Why can you Create Sub-Task from an Epic, but can't link?

[Lisy Kane]

Hi folks!

First time poster - I'm doing a big deep dive in how to better give/receive feedback and iterate using JIRA and one thing that's come up is the topic of Sub-Tasks.

There is a "Create Sub Task" button on Epics however they don't automatically link to the Epic and as far as I can tell, it's not best practice to have Sub Tasks directly under Epics?

Can you easily remove the button on Epics AND is this standard practice?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

I assume you are talking about the Epic Link, rather than issue links.

Sub-tasks are a part of their parent issue, and hence you have no need to set an Epic Link on them.  Because they are a part of a parent, they logically take their Epic from their parent.

Annoyingly for those of us trying to do simple reports like "everything in this Epic", the link does not cascade down to the sub-tasks, and that's a long-standing fault with Jira Software. 

But you don't need to set an Epic link on a sub-task.

[Lisy Kane]

We have a filter that takes Epics and displays Linked Issues and Sub-Tasks don't show up there.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Your filter sounds like it is broadly right, and strictly right when it ignores sub-tasks.

I think we need to see the filter definition and a  description of what it returns vs what you expect before we can do much more (as usual, feel free to obscure detail, but a copy/paste of JQL where we do stuff like "project = ABC" to replace real detail works very well for debugging)

[Stuart Capel - London]

Hi Lisy,

Apparently some people do have use cases for this but interestingly enough it's something that has been taken away from the new issues view.

It's not standard practice necessarily as the accepted hierarchy is:

Epic

Bug/Story/Task

Sub-task

But it seems you could do it, and now that it's been taken away some people have used it in processes and don't want it removed. Here is a request that's gathering support to have this feature added to the new view: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-72060

There is a use case in the comments at the bottom.

To answer the first part of your question - although it was probably not easy, the development team at Jira have done it :)

If you want to switch to new view and have admin you can go to 'Settings' > 'Personal Jira Settings' and under Jira labs at the bottom you can toggle the new view on and off

[G subramanyam]

Hi @Lisy Kane that's interesting one and I'm eager to listen from the Atlassian developers.