Use epic or subtask for project management activities

James Mark Chan

For work to administer an epic and or any miscellaneous project management is it a good idea to budget time on the epic JIRA itself or is it better to create a sub-task of the epic for this?

If we used the epic itself it would make sense that the epic issue would be placed into the sprints that it was worked on but if it were a sub-task then the epic would never be placed into the sprint.

Petter Gonçalves

Hello James,

Thank you for reaching out.

Per your description, you are wondering if your team should log the time spent in Epics or Child issues (Stories, tasks, etc) for your project. Is that correct?

Please, allow me to bring you some concepts so we can better know that we're on the same page:

Basically, Jira application has three types of issue hierarchy:

Epics -> Standard issue types (Stories, Tasks, etc) -> Sub-tasks

Epics are used to group a bigger amount of work, while the standard-issue types are used to focus on specific tasks that can still be split into sub-tasks, depending on the complexity of your project.

Describing to you a practical example, let's suppose you would like to improve your company site. A good way to track its progress with Jira would be to create the Epic "Design of the site" with the Stories "Main page", "Contact page" and "Product page". 

In fact, Epics are not items you would work on directly, but more of a way to group stories and tasks together so you can have a general view of your team progress. That's the reason why Epics can not be placed directly into Sprints.

That being said, I would suggest you log the time spent directly on your tasks instead of the Epics. In case you want to see the total time spent on all the Tasks/Stories related to an Epic, you can use the Epic panel in the board view or the Epic report of your Scrum project.

Additionally, I suggest you take a look at the article below. It has some useful tips on how to use Epics in Jira:

Learn how to use Epics in Jira Software 

Let us know if this information makes sense.