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Can stories have tasks?

Nathan Hazout

I'm just starting to play with JIRA.

I selected a Scrum board, team-managed.

I created Epics in the Roadmap view, and added child stories from there as well.

Within the story, I clicked on "Add a child issue". I expected it to be a "Task", but it's a sub-task.

Also if I manually create a task, and click "add parent", I only get offered Epics, not stories.

Does it make sense? What's the difference between task and story if they both seat at the same hierarchy?

Is this something I could tweak?

Accepted answers

Suvradip Paul

Hi @Nathan Hazout

Thanks for posting and welcome to community and sharing your observations.

I will try to summarise and give you an overview along with details.

Initiative - Collection of EPICs that drive to a common business goal.
EPIC - A large body of work that can be broken down into number of 'issues'/ features known as Stories. Please go through this Atlassian Article - https://www.atlassian.com/agile/project-management/epics .
Story - Feature Requirement written from a user perspective that would add values to customer. I would recommend this Atlassian article to read and let me in case of any further queries - https://www.atlassian.com/agile/project-management/user-stories
Task - Not directly feature request but the work needs to be done to build the feature. Yes, the fall at the same level with Story.
Subtask - Nested under Story, Task. It is use to track the the entire piece of work under Story/Task to split and so that the individual can be tracked separately.
Theme - Large Focus are that spans across organization aka High level Organisation goals. Please go though this Article for details - https://www.atlassian.com/agile/project-management/epics-stories-themes .

I hope that clarify your doubts.

Please feel free to ask else accept this answer if it responds your query.

Stay safe and heathy.

Cheers

Suvradip

All comments

Jack Brickey

Your observations are accurate. The supported hierarchy in Jira…

Epic

Story/Task

Sub-task

story and task are at the same level and the only child option is subtask for both.

Suvradip Paul

Hi @Nathan Hazout

Thanks for posting and welcome to community and sharing your observations.

I will try to summarise and give you an overview along with details.

Initiative - Collection of EPICs that drive to a common business goal.
EPIC - A large body of work that can be broken down into number of 'issues'/ features known as Stories. Please go through this Atlassian Article - https://www.atlassian.com/agile/project-management/epics .
Story - Feature Requirement written from a user perspective that would add values to customer. I would recommend this Atlassian article to read and let me in case of any further queries - https://www.atlassian.com/agile/project-management/user-stories
Task - Not directly feature request but the work needs to be done to build the feature. Yes, the fall at the same level with Story.
Subtask - Nested under Story, Task. It is use to track the the entire piece of work under Story/Task to split and so that the individual can be tracked separately.
Theme - Large Focus are that spans across organization aka High level Organisation goals. Please go though this Article for details - https://www.atlassian.com/agile/project-management/epics-stories-themes .

I hope that clarify your doubts.

Please feel free to ask else accept this answer if it responds your query.

Stay safe and heathy.

Cheers

Suvradip

Nathan Hazout

I don't see "Theme" nor "Initiative" in my JIRA, are those actual types or just concepts?

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-

Depends on the app you use to implement them!

With Advanced Roadmaps, they are Concepts more than issue types.

Suvradip Paul

Thanks @Nic Brough -Adaptavist- for pitching in and explaining. Much appreciated.

@Nathan Hazout - I tried to give a bigger picture with summary of related stuffs as you have asked some fundamental things. I hope this would help others in community too.

You can have a look at this if you want to know more about Advanced Roadmaps

- https://confluence.atlassian.com/advancedroadmapscloud/configuring-the-scope-view-998651442.html

Entire Advanced Roadmaps Documentation - https://confluence.atlassian.com/advancedroadmapscloud/advanced-roadmaps-home-998650885.html

Note - All these discussions are based to Cloud type,

Please let me know incase of any further queries or accept the answer. Thanks.

Cheers

Suvradip

Anatoly Spektor

Epics are like a major grouping

Stories are parts of business value

Task is general ticket to describe something that is not a story

Sub-task is the way to divide Stories to sub pieces

If you are more visual person, I have created this pretty popular video describing Epic vs Story vs Task with example in Jira, it might help: https://youtu.be/8fLNtFJkj10

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-

To be careful here, that is not always the right terminology. Task is a very generalised word, just "someone needs to make some effort to do this".

Jira Software's hierarchy is

Epic
Standard Issue Types (Story for example, but Bug, Improvement, and a couple of others are created by default in Jira)
Sub-task Issue Types (Technical task and sub-task are the ones you'll see off-the-shelf in Jira)

But you can set up whatever names you want for many types on the issue and sub-task levels. (You can only have one Epic type)

You'll note that I specifically did not mention "task" in the examples. This is because some people will create and use Tasks at the issue level, and others will set them up at the sub-task level.

I've worked on a lot of Jira systems, of the five I remember looking at last week, two had tasks at the issue/story/feature level, two had sub-task level tasks, and one had got rid of "Tasks" completely because it was too vague a term and no-one could remember what level they were at.

Sjoerd van Hoof

There is actually a way to work with this.

If you for example want to add tasks to a story, these are the steps I always take:

1. Create a story.

2. Add sub-tasks in the story under 'add a child issue'.

3. Add story to a sprint.

4. In your sprint board, select 'Group by: Sub task' in the upper right corner.

Then you will see an overview of all your stories including the status of each sub-task. Works like charm!

Jack Brickey

Hi @Sjoerd van Hoof , to be clear this doesn’t present “tasks” under “stories” which was the primary inquiry of this post.

Sjoerd van Hoof

True, I tried to give an answer on the problem rather than the exactly formulated question. I ran into this issue myself and found several questions related to this issue that were too outdated to respond to.

Rehan

Is this an oversight of how Jira Work Management is used versus Jira Software? In a business project, you may have work tasks that are grouped by a user story or business driver. Then the subtasks are the checklist or independent smallest assignments that can complete that work task.

Rehan

It's strange that all the community discussions focus so much on Jira Software when its clear that an increasing number of users are using Jira Work Management to coordinate business projects and organize agile work process. With that said, stories need tasks underneath it so that subtasks can be within that - it's a natural way of building work projects and assignments.

We need a threat that organizes all the community members who want to learn how to build their own issue type hierarchies for grouping work tasks versus work requirements/user stories.