Creating Follow-On Tasks or Sub-Tasks

You sometimes need to break a task into smaller tasks to make it easier to set out what needs to get done or to allow different aspects of the task to be assigned to different people. For example, a task to communicate about a new product feature may involve sending an email to clients, adding a notification to the website and building some training materials. 

On other occasions, the completion of a task may also result in the creation of another task. This can be particularly the case in the context of workflow processes where a task needs to be sent to another board once it has gone through the initial workflow. If you manage a Recruitment Board for instance, you may need to send the task relating to a new hire to the Employee Onboarding Board once the new hire is confirmed.

This article will explain how you can create follow-on tasks (or sub-tasks) for the same board or another board.

Creating a follow-on task or sub-task on the same board

To break your task into smaller tasks on the same board, open the task dialog and select the Follow on link from the navigation menu. Then click on the Create a child task button.

Once the dialog opens, fill in the details of the sub-task and click on Create when done.

Note: if the Add to Sprint or Backlog field is left blank then the system will send the task to the backlog. 

You can track the status of the sub-tasks by navigation to the Follow-on section of the parent task's dialog. 

The parent task card will also display how many sub-tasks there are and how many are completed.

Creating a follow-on task on a different board

To create a follow-on task on another board, open the task dialog and select the Follow on link from the navigation menu. Then click on the Create a task on a different board button.

Once the dialog opens, you can enter the new task title and select the board you want to send the new task to. You also have the option to Clone the task by checking the checkbox. The new task will then be a copy of the current task, i.e. will have the same title, description, etc. Please note that currently the attachments and checklist items are not copied when creating the new task.

As for sub-tasks created on the same board, you can track the status of the follow-on tasks from the task dialog. The card will also display the number of follow-on tasks that have been completed.