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
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.
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- 2015-01-13: I have added a note to reflect that fact that this article is outdated.
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 :D
February 25th, 2015 at 10:25 am
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?
January 12th, 2016 at 10:30 am
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
January 12th, 2016 at 11:38 am
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
January 12th, 2016 at 4:50 pm
Hi, you plugin has been a huge help for us, do you have any intention of porting it to JIRA online?
January 13th, 2016 at 6:02 am
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
August 10th, 2016 at 12:30 pm
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?
August 11th, 2016 at 4:30 am
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
February 20th, 2023 at 8:59 am
Does it support jira 9.x version in data center model?
March 7th, 2023 at 7:47 am
No, and the plugin also is dead, sorry to say that
May 19th, 2023 at 4:13 pm
Your plugin has been a life saver for years for us. I understand you consider the plugin dead, but any chance you want to publish the source code and let the community take over?