Functional Stories, Spikes, Technical Stories! Help

[Steven Cooper]

Hi, I just recently started working for a software company and my PO keeps asking us to create a variety of issues. She creates an issue ("[functional] issue name") and asks us to keep that ticket on the backlog and ask us to create a new story whenever we add it to our Sprint Backlog so she can keep track of the tasks on the backlog.

She also requests that whenever we face a blocker we should create a Spike ("[spike] issue name").

I'm not familiar with this way of working but I would love to hear your thoughts on this way of working within Jira. Have you heard of something like this before? Does it make sense?

[Robert Wen_Cprime_]

Hello @Steven Cooper !  Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

It's VERY possible that the work your team does isn't there to provide direct business value and can't be easily encapsulated as a User Story.  Some work you may have to do may be there to pare/eliminate technical debt, research unknowns, or enhance architecture.  If you've ever seen the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), these items are called Enablers.

This work is elaborated into the types of work items you mentioned (functional stories, spikes, technical stories) and estimated (yes, they count against capacity).  In Jira, these may be separate issue types or a custom field describing the type of story.

[Floki]

From my experiences, we use issue type 'Spike' for any research tickets which outcome might be a design doc, planning, or other stuff.

We use Story for real functionality from the user's perspective, we use tasks to track any engineering works.