Enhancing User Story and Task Integration in Jira

[Lior Cohen]

Hello Jira Community,

Our team faces a challenge: product managers handle user stories, while developers manage tasks with estimations. This division creates visual and estimations issues, hindering cohesive work tracking.
we cant group tasks by user stories on backlog and the backlog become unmanageable.

Visual Clarity: User stories lack a clear visual connection to tasks, making board and backlog management less effective.

estimations Complications: estimations gaps happened because if we have pricing to the user stories and tasks so we have double pricing or if we don't add estimation to the user story so we have an unestimated entity.

Seeking suggestions for a streamlined solution that maintains our roles but improves user story-task integration and pricing accuracy.

Appreciate your insights!

[Ste Wright]

Hi @Lior Cohen 

Can't Product Managers and Developers work collaboratively on just a Story-level?

You could also have the Developers use Sub-tasks, which are children of a Story, and then estimations could roll-up to the Story-parent?

Ste

[Lior Cohen]

Hi @Ste Wright Thank you for your quick response

We work on them together, but sometimes the user story is estimated by 7 days and we split it into tasks (because in our agile process, we believe that if the estimation is longer than 2-3 days they should break into multiple jobs).

Also in some cases, we planned the "User Story" for more than one sprint.

In addition, we split the tasks on the user story between multiple developers, and in that case, we can't use sub-tasks because they are not visible on the backlog screen just if you drill down on the relevant task. (and it causes the planning meetings to be complex)

Maybe we have a "Missing" entity layer because in other tools I know that you have the following hierarchy :

Epic, Feature, user story, tasks, and sun tasks, basically we use the user story like a feature entity.

[Ste Wright]

Hi @Lior Cohen 

What's stopping you making the user story smaller, so it fits within your digestible sizing?

It sounds like your user stories are currently too large, which is making tasks a necessity, rather than utilising the work breakdown hierarchy the other way - i.e Feature, based on your hierarchy above.

It might also mean you're losing the connection between user story goal and acceptance criteria.

I would consider your ways of working alongside your tooling, but some other tooling ideas are below!

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You're not going to get the structure you're looking for within Jira as standard - because it's working to a structure that user stories are the level which is sized and put into Sprints. You can link Tasks to the Stories using linked issues, but it's not a parent/child relationship, it'll be sibling based.

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There are some other options though...

• Customise the Issue Type Hierarchy: Create a custom hierarchy, if you have Jira Premium. This would allow you to make Story the "parent" of Task...
  • Add User Story to the Epic level, in line with Epic
  • Rename the "Epic" level to be called "User Story" or similar - assuming the renaming functionality has rolled out to your instance, this will rename fields on the Board (like Epic Panel) to "User Story Panel"
  • There are some caveats though...
    • You need to use the "Parent Link" field between each level
    • The official "Epic" level will be defunct, as you're replacing it with User Story
    • This is applied platform-wide - so will change for all users, not just one team
• Use an App: Some Apps will allow you to extend hierarchy functionality, for example...
  • Structure
  • JXL - Table Sheets 
  • Hierarchy for Jira
  • Links Hierarchy
  • ...or another App from the Marketplace

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Let us know what you think!

Ste