How do I attribute stories to features/units?

[steve.syme]

Hi there,

I'm reasonably new to Jira, and from a hardware rather than software development environment.

I'm trying to find out if there's an item type that can be used to tie epics/user stories back an already existing software build.

As an example - on build 1, we develop a software feature that meets a user story; we lock it down and release it.  By build 4, we have user update requests that requires an update to that same feature/unit.  So, I would expect to be able to:

- construct an epic

- in the epic, see a drop down list of the software features currently available in our build (being a prepopulated list, which would expand every time we develop a new feature)

- choose the features impacted by the epic from the drop down list

- attribute user stories to each of those features

and move one

So that there ould be a build history that could easily be discerned i.e. the feature would collect the epics/user stories attributed to it; you would be able to see what releases it was updated for, adn what those updates were; you would be able to understand whether an epic could be satisifed through a feature update or would require a new feature to be constructed; etc.  The feature would remain an available piece of software for use, unless replaced/retired.

But unless I'm misunderstanding something, Feature items within Jira don't have this sense of history; a feature is just an item type with a configurable title, like all the other items.  Am I correct in this?  If not, why am I not seeing this functionality?  Or, is there something else similar to what I'm asking?

I hope my query comes across ok!  Thanks for your help in this, Steve