JIRA Subtask Manager

If you use subtasks in JIRA, you've likely had issues with trying to manage them.  It's very difficult to get a comprehensive view of subtasks for a ticket all in one screen.  Using a little tweak to the JIRA configuration and a small Greasemonkey script, I think I've made the process much easier.

First, you need to enable the 'description' field in the subtask list.  Open up your '/WEB-INF/classes/jira-application.properties' file and find the 'jira.table.cols.subtasks' property.  Add 'description' to it (I put it after 'summary').  Similarly, find the 'jira.subtask.quickcreateform.fields' property and add 'description' to it also.  Then save and restart JIRA.

Second, load up this userscript (make sure to fix the server to match your JIRA installation) into Greasemonkey.  It does a few things, but primarily it moves the description into its own row and changes the summary to link to the edit form instead of the browse page.

Also note that if you want to reorder the subtasks more efficiently, you can very easily tweak the URLs for the up/down links to move more than one step at a time.  If you copy the URL of one of the links you'll see two numbers in it.  The first number is the current position of the issue and the second is the desired position.  They'll always be one apart, but you can change the second number to any valid position to jump the subtask to that position in the list.  Hardly an ideal interface, but it's faster than moving one step at a time if you have to move more than a couple spots.  Eventually I'll probably improve that in the userscript to some level, but not exactly sure how I want it to work so I'm leaving it as-is for now.

Update 2011-09-16: I've made a couple additional tweaks to the script and removed the inline version.  Completed subtasks are now greyed out and descriptions hidden so they're not as intrusive.