epics and issues

[Michael Daitzman]

Why would I use issues in epics vs. making story's and their tasks children of an epic?

[Michael Daitzman]

Thanks @Julia Wester [Wittified] and @Simon Kegel - I fear I was to broad in my question.

In previous companies we viewed Epics as hierarchical - Epic was the top, Story was a child, tasks were children of stories, and subtasks childrenof tasks. Often stories would be linked and I think we even soetimes inked epics to each other.  I am not sure if this was a choice we made or the way earlier versions of JIRA worked. 

My current company adopted JIRA before I was there and in some projects we have epics with stories captured as "issues in epic X" or "Issue in epic Y".

I am trying to understand the benefits and costs of each approach-child parent vs. Issues in.

Thanks!

[Julia Wester [Wittified]]

an epic is a concept/large deliverable.  (aka Homepage)

a story is a single use case from that concept (which can be independently delivered) (a module on the homepage)

a task is an activity that you do to deliver the story. (testing, coding, monitoring, etc on that module)

Hopefully that makes sense

[Simon Kegel //SEIBERT/MEDIA]

Hey Michael,

you would do that because that's the way it works. ^^
It's a matter of structure.
For example:
The Lord of the Ring Books as EPIC.
Then your stories would be like S1- "Find the Ring", S2-"Burn the Ring", S3- "Drink beer with gimli"
And subtasks for the Stories -S could be:
S1- Sub: Get the ring from your uncle (short one)
S2- Sub: Don't get caught by nazguls, Don't get eaten by a giant spider, Get your stuff to mordor etc.

Your Epic is the container to be released at the end of the day.
It's more like a name.
The story is the definition of the task which must be done.
And subtasks are the issue for the actual doing.
This way you should build your agile -
don't parent tasks to stories - that is all given by Agile from the beginning. (Epic-Link-Field and Agile Boards)

Hope this can help you a bit.

Greets
Simon