When passing stories to epics, the subtasks of the stories cannot be massively passed to tasks of th

[Sara Garcia]

We have started to use sprints recently, sprint of several projects at the same time, we find that "single" subtasks cannot be assigned to said sprint, but they have to be tasks.

I had classified epics with stories in the project where each story had subtasks. We have omitted the initial epics "up one degree" the level of the issues. So we have changed the type of stories to epics, however, the issues within the stories are still subtasks. So up to this point I have Epics with subtasks.

When looking at the information of the subtasks, you cannot see what epics they are. Therefore I have looked to change all those subtasks to tasks en masse.

The problem is that when subtasks are passed to tasks, it loses the link with the parent and I have to go task by task putting the epic link.

Is there a way to pass subtasks to tasks while keeping the parent / epic link?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

Welcome to the community!

I think you may not be understanding what sub-tasks are.  They are not individual items that a team might commit to doing in a sprint, they are a part of their parent issue.

Imagine a sprint as, well, a sprint.  A race that happens every week.  You enter Dave this week, as a Story (like "Dave runs in the sprint").  You wouldn't enter Dave's left leg in next week's race and not this week's - Dave's left leg is part of him.  Dave's left leg is a sub-task.

So rather than converting sub-tasks to tasks, I'd recommend educating your users as to what a sub-task actually is and get them to use them properly (or stop creating them to represent tasks).  This will stop the need to change them to tasks.

For the ones that are hung over from previous misuse, no, I'm afraid there's no way to link them to an Epic other than by editing the link by hand.

[Sara Garcia]

Of course, the problem is that all the tasks were already created as subtasks of a story. And the conversion has been done because really the story was not a story and the subtasks are not subtasks but more tasks. But thanks anyway.

[Ignacio Pulgar · Accepted solution]

Hi @Sara Garcia ,

I agree with @Nic Brough -Adaptavist- .

In order to bulk change the issue type of sub-tasks to stories, and then add the appropriate Epic Link, you may follow these steps:

1. Execute a query like: parent = <parent issue key>
2. Bulk change the issues returned to add to all of them a new label like: EPIC-123
   Where EPIC-123 is the issue key of the Epic you would like them to belong.
3. Execute this query: labels = EPIC-123
   The same issues should be returned.
4. Bulk Move all returned issues to the Story issue type.
5. Bulk edit all those issues to set Epic Link = EPIC-123

Hope it helps.

Regards

[Sara Garcia]

Thanks, this was a good idea, until epics have spaces and tags don't allow them.

It would take longer to make all the changes and remove all the spaces from the epics, put it as a label, and then link to the epic than to do the link manually.

I will try to create an incident for Jira to see if the database can change it, which is really a very simple query.

Thank you anyway

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Do not try to do this in the database, it is NOT a simple query and you are likely to get it wrong and break your system. You will need to be planning for backups, rollbacks and significant downtime as well.

[Ignacio Pulgar]

Again, listen @Nic Brough -Adaptavist- 's wise tip ;)