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  • 2015-01-13: I have added a note to reflect that fact that this article is outdated.