New Plugin released: Quick Subtasks for JIRA

August 21st, 2012 by

Recently 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.

 

Update Note

This article was written in 2012 – nowerdays the plugin offers much more features and a new syntax, please refer to the plugin’s wiki pages here for up-to-date information about features, usage etc.

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 on YouTube.

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.

Quick Subtasks for Jira on the Atlassian Marketplace

  • Plugin Documentation
  • Issue Tracker
  • Article Updates

    • 2018-06-01: Embedded YouTube video removed (GDPR/DSGVO).
    • 2015-01-13: I have added a note to reflect that fact that this article is outdated.

    Tags: , , , , ,

    11 Responses to “New Plugin released: Quick Subtasks for JIRA”

    1. Matt Doar Says:

      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.

    2. micha kops Says:

      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 :D

    3. Alistair Roylance Says:

      Thank you so much for the wonderful plugin. We have a very complex scenario of creating hundreds of sub-tasks on 7 different issue types. I have been trying to use a workflow post-function to trigger the multiple sub-tasks templates – but there is no condition to specify the parent issue type. Am I doing something wrong or is there a way in which you can think of getting this to work?

    4. Raghav Says:

      Hello,
      My use case is such, that I have more no. of custom fields to inherit from parent whenever the sub-tasks get auto created upon a transition. Currently my syntax has been like:

      - Begin Start phase – Requirement gathering, SOW etc / Component/s:”@inherit” / Deployment Type:”@inherit” / Product:”@inherit” / Customer build Version:”@inherit” / Platform_OS:”@inherit” / Form_Factor:”@inherit”

      But it doesn’t inherit the values for all fields except for Component/s. Is there anything that I might missed entering here? Please let me know.

      Secondly, just like multiple sub-tasks of same type getting created is there a way to create various types of sub-tasks at one go??

      Would be nice if any of you can respond at the earliest.

      Thank you!
      Raghav

    5. Micha Kops Says:

      Hi Raghav,

      inheriting custom fields is implemented in release 4.0 (published soon): https://bitbucket.org/hascode/jira-quick-subtasks/issues/39/inherit-custom-fields-from-parent-issue

      Full feature list:
      https://bitbucket.org/hascode/jira-quick-subtasks/issues?&milestone=4.0.0

      Existing features are documented in detail here: https://bitbucket.org/hascode/jira-quick-subtasks/wiki/

      Please feel free to add new feature requests to the project’s issue tracker here: https://bitbucket.org/hascode/jira-quick-subtasks/issues

      Best regards

      Micha

    6. Josh Says:

      Hi, you plugin has been a huge help for us, do you have any intention of porting it to JIRA online?

    7. Micha Kops Says:

      Hi Josh,

      I’m sorry to say that I don’t think that I will be porting the plugin to JIRA cloud soon, nevertheless a corresponding feature request does already exist, please feel free to comment/follow it in the project’s issue tracker here: https://bitbucket.org/hascode/jira-quick-subtasks/issues/216/as-a-jira-cloud-user-i-would-love-access

      Cheers,

      Micha

    8. Steve Hill Says:

      When I click on Add Multiple Sub Tasks, Jira asks me if I want to Open or Save a JSON file. I do not see the screen shown in your demos?

      What to do?

    9. Micha Kops Says:

      Please feel free open a request in the project’s issue tracker here: https://bitbucket.org/hascode/jira-quick-subtasks/issues?status=new&status=open

    10. issa Says:

      Does it support jira 9.x version in data center model?

    11. Micha Kops Says:

      No, and the plugin also is dead, sorry to say that

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