Sidehistorik
Being an Atlassian Administrator and developer for 10 years, I've done a lot of JIRA deployments, administration, managing and developing workflows.
This is ITIL stuff as Incident- and Change-management, Tasks etc. But also more special needs as a large CMDB, Customer, Subscription, Employee, License and Contract Databases. Internally in my Copmpany we use JIRA for all sorts of thing, including being "mailbox" for a lot of the standard company mail-addresse as job@ support@ info@ etc etc; so we dont need distrubutionlists and all incomment mail are handled and tracked probably by an assignee.
As an admin, You probably would know that Subtasks, actually defined as an issue bing a child of another issue (we will call it parent and child) - is an option You can select to disable in You JIRA.
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- Its an unfortunate name, as there also is a default issuetype called Sub-task (with a hyphen). This is very confusing for many users and admins, that Subtasks is a concept for at relationship, as well as an issue type called Sub-taskstask. The concept could have been called child-tasks or children (to resemple the Confluence page relations)
- Subtasks always are in the same project as the parent.
- Subtasks to subtasks are not possible, there is only one sub-level
- Subtasks are not useable for Jira Service Desk Request Types.
- Jira has little awareness regarding the interaction between
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There are several reasons:
Remove
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confusion and simplifying
You remove the confusion between the concept and the issue-type.
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Subtasks and issue links are represented in 2 different styles / ways in the UI, it does not look well, and as a user You are never sure where to look for related tasks under Subtasks or Issue Links
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I have grown very fond of the Issue Matrix App to display linked issues and issues that can be corrolated by fields. Its awesome and , flexible - and includes inline edit |
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Added flexability
As Subtasks only can leve live in the same project as the parent, it can cant be moved to other projects, this is quite a limition for many companies that has different JIRA projects for different departments/functions when subtasks are used for delegating work.
Some users wont make a subtask, but a linked issue anyway- other users might create a subtasks and then a linked issue in another project.
Double programming of functionality
As Jira has no builtin awareness/functionality that relates to the partparent-child or linked issues relation (Links are out of the box primarily a visual enhancement to show a relation), I am often are asked by customers to program such things - this is often:
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- Some awareness of issues blocking each other issues; like when a issue/subtasks is closed, other issues are made aware of this by transition or comment.
- Duplication of comments between issues; some issue are added an attachmentcomment (could be by a customer), and parent/child/linked issues are automatiocally automatically added the same attachment comment.
- Duplication of attachments between issues; some issue are added an attachment, and parent/child/linked issues are automatiocally automatically added the same attachment.
Very often, these functionalities need to be programmed twice; one for subtasks and one for linked issues.
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