Creating tasks in Jira [closed]

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I have bought Jira, Greenhopper and Confluence and I have been using their products, but I have not been very good at writing tasks properly.

Let say you have a task in your project that you know consist of several minor tasks, then you would make subtasks to the overall task. What happens when you have completed all the subtasks? Do you drag the overall task over as well (I mean the parent task)?

How do you write your tasks? Do you write them just like: "Create Customer table in database"? And if this task consist of making indexes, constraints etc do you write subtasks to it? Or do you write tasks in another way?

Answer 1

As all things management there is no common practice in this, but here are some guidelines I personally use and we integrate in our company.

1. The summary should be descriptive of the issue. It should not contain a word describing an issue type: bug, feature, task etc. That's what the "issue type" attribute is for. For example: "Re-check the site for any problems, resolve permissions issue" or "Text corrections".
2. It is good to have the Priority, Due Date, Environment, Component/s, Affects Vers, Fix Vers and Labels attributes - for those that you're using but keep in mind that the more attributes defined the more information an issue holds, the more descriptive it is and the more manageable.
3. The description field should hold all available information described in a formal manner.

Sub-tasking:

This solely depends on your organization, but there was a bug in Greenhopper that I personally reported and is now resolved:

"Sub-tasks' estimate does not show in Master Task in RapidBoard's Plan Perspective"

"We are experiencing a problem with rapid board sprints. Our Master issue * does not have an estimation of its own, but does have an estimation when you include the subtasks. As you can see from the attached screenshots, when we include this master issue in the next sprint, we do not see the estimation sum for all of its child issues. They are not shown at all."

So for subtasking we now use this new (fixed) feature - the master tasks's estimate is the sum of all estimates for an issue. I personally subtask only when the master is something very complex, but with my job that's every day's work.

Hope this helps but again this is my personal opinion.