Estimation of issues

[Bill Zhou]

I'm new to JIRA. I don't understand why we can only put estimation on User Story but not for other types (e.g. Improvements). In the past, my team only use User Story and put estimation before each sprint started, so we would have a basic idea how many tasks should be included based on estimation from previous sprint. Right now we would like to use other issue types for better organization (For example: improvements, new feature, bugs, etc). 

So I have two questions:

1. Can someone give me a brief description about differences between user story and other types (improvements, new feature, bugs)
2. If we can only put estimation to user stories, then how are we gonna estimate each sprint?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

Well, it's a generalisation to say that you only estimate stories.  Atlassian's default approach to "estimate stories, not the rest" is sort of outlined at https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/AGILE/Estimating+an+Issue

But there's a lot of flexibility in both the way you use JIRA and the way you could try to be Agile.  Personally, I find the "estimate stories only" default more than a little weak, and a LOT of people do what I suspect you're thinking - estimate everything, not just stories.  To do that, you need to tweak your project configuration - make sure that the field you're estimating on (original estimate, story points or other numeric field) is valid for all the issue types in the project, and has been added to all the screens in use.

Have a look through https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/Configuring+Fields+and+Screens

[Bill Zhou]

Really helpful, may need to read more about documents.