In greenhopper, should i use the summary or description field for user story?

[Eddie Tse]

Using greenhopper 6, which field should be used when creating Story issue type? I can use the summary field to enter in the story, but it doesn't seems to display well on the issues screen, and the planning board because the fields are single line text box, rather than a mult-line text box that fits the full text?

When green hopper was designed, is the story meant to be captured using the summary field or the description field?

[Arthur Goncalves · Accepted solution]

Hello Sprinkle,

I recommend to you use the Summary field for a briefly description of the story and use the Description field to enter the full story, since Summary has a 255 characters limitation and the Description field is virtually unlimited.

Cheers,

Arthur Gonçalves

[Jay Rogers]

Hi Sprinkle,

The GreenHopper fields are largely inherited from JIRA, but if you think about it "Summary" can be anything that quickly gets the meaning across, and Description is large and unbounded.

I see a lot of people use Summary for user stories, but that wastes a lot of space, as the beginning of each story has that persona boilerplate : "As a BrickLayer I want self-mortaring bricks so I can work more quickly". So the initial part of each Summary says "As a _______ I want a..." which is just duplicated information.

In this case, I personally would just put "Self-Mortaring Bricks" in the Summary, and put the full user story and further commentary in the Description.

[Eddie Tse]

Hi Arthur and Jay,

Thank you for your answers, both makes sense to me. I was a little confused because there are videos and screenshop on the Greenhopper site puts the story directly in the summary field and then when you really use the product, you start to notice it doesn't work that well, especially when you switch between the greenhopper screens and the base Jira screens.

In the classic boards and the current Rapid board, it defaults to show the summary only, hence it was a little unclear how it was designed.