Why is Team field in sub-task disabled?

[Helga Tryggvadóttir]

I have Team fields in Epic, story, task and sub-task. It's editable in all issues, except in sub-task.

It's the "shared Teams" field in Plans that I'm using in all issue types.

When I try to edit it in sub-task, it's not editable, it behaves like a static text, rather than editable field.

I also tried to edit it by going into Plans and edit the field there in Team column, but same, it's not editable.

I have looked at all settings for the screen, the field settings, and the settings for the  issue type sub-task, nothing there that explains it.

To complicate things even more, when I open Plans, it looks like there is an inherited team from the parent of the sub-task - but cannot be edited...

yet when I open this sub-task, the Team field is empty and cannot be edited:

Does anyone know why the Team field cannot be edited, only on sub-task level?

[Sandesh Shetty · Accepted solution]

@Helga Tryggvadóttir A subtask is a part of parent issue, not a separate issue. So If an issue is belongs to a team then subtask is also belongs to the same team. So you can't edit the team.

If you want to add different team to the subtask then we can't call that as a subtask, you have to create that as a standard issue.

[Pierre Leroux]

What about Matrix organizations where Scrum Teams are composed of multi-disciplinary teams composed of people from different discipline teams? That would be very handy to forecast the workload per discipline with Advanced Roadmaps. We can already forecast the workload per scrum team with many other tools, this seems redundant and not that useful if we can't use discipline teams spread among multiple scrum teams. 

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

You should not be using sub-tasks for that.  Scrum teams are supposed to be multi-disciplinary and work together on a story, not divide stories across teams.

[Pierre Leroux]

@Nic Brough -Adaptavist- I am not dividing stories across scrum teams. subtasks stay in the very same scrum team. I am just trying to anticipate the workload per discipline so that I can know if a very specialized scrum team member is needed at 100%, or not at all for the next sprints. That person would hate to be idle, and my budget will hate that person to be idle :-) . So by creating a NON-scrum shared team (aka discipline Team) in the Advanced Roadmap where the same person would be, and assigning the sub-tasks to a discipline team as well as to the scrum team (matrix way), I thought I could have a view of the workload of all the persons of that discipline, so that we can optimize team composition over time. But maybe Advanced Roadmap is not the right tool for that.

[Helga Tryggvadóttir · Accepted solution]

Thank you for your answers. It sums up to - Team field should not be an option for sub-tasks due to the nature of sub-tasks. It makes sense.

Just to clarify, we are using the team field in our case to split the work between two groups in the same team - yes I know, it's a bit of a customization, but since the Team field was offered so nicely in the sub-task, I wanted to use it as well :)

Thank you for your anwers :)

[Jack Brickey · Accepted solution]

Hi @Helga Tryggvadóttir ,

disclaimer - I don’t use Teams field currently but hopefully my understanding adds value yo my response.

According to this article - what-are-teams-in-advanced-roadmaps - 

the Teams field is a way to use features like capacity management without assigning issues to individuals, which happens in sprint grooming or planning sessions.

If you accept that sub-tasks are not intended to be planned independent of its parent story then all subtasks should inherit from the parent. Obviously this is different from Epics where stories can be owned by different teams. 

Hopefully this helps but may someone using Teams has a doc reference that directly addresses to question.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

Because it's nonsense to have a different team on a sub-task.

A sub-task is part of a story.  A team commits to dealing with a story, not bits of it.

[Thomas Prien-Larsen]

 @Nic Brough -Adaptavist- All discussions I find seem to revolve around Stories, but how about Tasks? I have an Epic for a feature that's shared between teams, and then a Task on that Epic regarding different responsibilities during rollout, where I want to assign different teams to different Sub-tasks on that rollout Task. This is now impossible. Not all organisations are running Scrum, and even if they do, they will still encounter tasks that require some cross-team involvement.

[Jack Brickey]

Hi @Thomas Prien-Larsen , tasks and stories are at the same "level" and therefore behave similarly. Fundamentally they are simply descriptive names.

you might be interested in this open issue - JSWCLOUD-20638 Allow different team assignment for parent and subtasks