New Plugin released: Quick Subtasks for Jira
August 21st, 2012 by micha kopsRecently after a long sprint planning meeting I had the pleasure to spend some time writing down the results of the team’s task breakdown in Jira.
In our process, each user story is documented as a Jira issue and each task from the breakdown is saved as a subtask for the parent issue.
Because I am too lazy in this situation I wrote the following plugin that allowed me to quickly create multiple subtasks for a selected Jira issue.
Contents
Usage
Simply open an issue, click on Create multiple Subtasks from the issue operations menu and type multiple lines – one for each issue.
Just take a look at the following screenshots and the screencast.
An example:
- Implementation - Write unit tests / takes 3h - Write Acceptance tests / takes 6h -Code Review - End user documentation / takes 4h
Pasting the text from above into the plugin would create the following subtasks for the selected issue:
- A subtask with title “Implementation”
- A subtask with title “Write unit test” and and estimated time of 3 hours
- A subtask with title “Write Acceptance test” and and estimated time of 6 hours
- A subtask with title “Code Review” -> the missing whitespace after the “-” is no problem here
- A subtask with title “End user documentation” and and estimated time of 4 hours
Screenshots
The following screenshot shows the data entry screen that allows you to write down multiple subtasks.
Screencast
In the following screencast you’re able to see the full process to create multiple subtasks for a given Jira issue.

August 21st, 2012 at 8:51 pm
Nice! Does it tell me if I’ve spelled “/ takes” wrong, so I know I have to go back and fix some of the subtasks? I guess that’s also related to asking if the action creation is atomic.
August 21st, 2012 at 9:33 pm
there is no explicit transaction rollback – if you’ve misspelled the estimated time you need to re-edit the subtask afterwards
An example of the current state:
- issue 1 /takes 3d
- issue 2 takes 3d
- issue 3 / takes 3x
Would produce 2 issues with the following summary:
“issue 2 takes 3d”
“issue 3″
Your remark has given me the idea to implement a preview function – and I have opened an issue here (comments and ideas are welcome
:
https://bitbucket.org/hascode/jira-quick-subtasks/issue/1/implement-a-preview-function-for-the
And thanks for the link check on my project’s page – I have fixed the link for the JQL Functions Collection