How to add an issue to a story in an epic

Nigel Morse

Playing with JIRA Agile so we can manage my teams backlog. I've got a scrum board, and set up some epics to sort the backlog out.  (We'll actually use a kanban board as that doesn't have a backlog yet in Server version - see Is there a "backlog" in Kanban?) 

I can now add stories to those epics and track those - but then I probably want to add issues (bugs/tasks) to those stories too - is there an easy way to do that?  Or should I just use stories and forget epics?

unknown

Hi Nigel,

This is one of those "Well it depends" type questions, so you may get a number of different approaches.

Personally I like what EPICs bring to the table. It provides a way to 'package' issues and that has been very helpful for us. As to your question regarding related Bugs and Tasks, there are a couple of ways you can deal with this...

1. You can add the Bugs/Tasks to the Story as sub-tasks. Using this approach means they are part of the Story and that may complicate things depending on what type of tracking you do. I initially tried that myself and finally decided it was not going to work for us. Now I only use sub-tasks for actual steps needed to complete/implement the story.
2. You can add the Bugs/Tasks as separate issues and link them to the Story. Note - you can define your own link types and use that to track issues that are related to each other. This is what we ended up doing and so far it seems a better implementation for us.

Let's see what others may contribute, but feel free to ask for any details that might help.