Jira tickets with open sub tickets can not close

[John Missar]

Example - I have a story with multiple child issues. Is there a way to prevent the story from getting closed if one or more child issues are still open? 

[Trudy Claspill · Accepted solution]

Hello @John Missar 

Welcome to the Atlassian community.

Is this for a Team Managed project or a Company Managed project? You can determine the project type by looking at the Type column on the View All Projects page available under the Projects menu.

[John Missar]

Hello @Trudy Claspill I am using the Team Managed project. 

[Trudy Claspill]

The options for identifying that subtasks are not closed when the parent issue is being transitioned to closed are limited in a Team Managed project. 

You can add Rules to a status transition in the workflows in a Team Managed project, but the built in rules do not include one to directly address this scenario.

Notice that there is a rule for Restrict to when a field is a specific value. You could use this to check a field in the parent issue that keeps a count of not-closed subtasks. You could use this rule to restrict the transition to allow only when  the "not-closed sub-tasks" field is 0.

You would need to use Automation Rule(s) to detect the creation of and transitions of sub-task type issues, and in each case evaluate all the sub-tasks of that one's parent issue to see if any are not-closed. If that evaluation reveals that the parent has not-closed sub-tasks, then the rule would set the "not-closed sub-tasks" field to a non-0 value.

[Trudy Claspill]

I should add that Atlassian has changed the packaging model for Automation, and changed how rules are counted against monthly execution limits. If you are going to add Automation Rules for this scenario you should review your current rule usage and the packaging model and your expectations for how often you thing these new rules would run to ensure you are not going to exceed the limits.

https://www.atlassian.com/blog/announcements/cloud-automation-packaging-update

[BHANU TEJA]

Hi @John Missar 

Try this automation rule and in the workflow add the condition

[Trudy Claspill]

@BHANU TEJA 

That does not exactly prevent the parent issue from being closed when it has sub-tasks that are not closed.

The automation rule will automatically close the parent issue when all its subtasks are closed. However, with the change from using Parent Link and Epic Link to the generic use of Parent for all hierarchy levels, a Condition needs to be added after the trigger to confirm that the trigger issue was actually a sub-task. And note that this rule doesn't "prevent" a transition, rather it executes a transition automatically.

I assume that the workflow Condition you proposed would be used in the workflow transition to Done for the issue types that can be parents of sub-tasks. Note that this advanced workflow configuration is available only if the issues are in a Company Managed project. Also, the Condition specified in the workflow will prevent any user from executing the transition manually in any circumstance. The only way the issue types that might be parents to sub-tasks could transition to Done would be through the Automation Rule. Also note that this Condition would affect the issue types that could have sub-tasks but don't actually have sub-tasks. So it would prevent the manual transition to Done through the UI for all standard level issues, and you have not suggested an alternate way to get those issues transitioned to Done.