How should I organise my user stories and bugs....

[Luke Jones]

We have one team of software developers who work on one product and this product is our main project in Jira.

We have Epics which are our big features - these epics have lots of user stories, tasks and when work begins on these epics, bugs are added throughout the sprints for the dev team to fix. Once all of the issues are resolved and the feature is released, the epic is marked as complete. Great. That's fine.

But the problem is the backlog. There are a lot of small user stories which aren't big enough chunks of work to form part of an epic, as well as this, there are a number of bugs which have been found and added to the backlog.

As you can imagine, the backlog is now extremely cluttered with tasks and bugs that don't and won't find their way into a sprint and won't do for a long time.

I'm looking for some advice on how best to manage these tasks and keep the backlog looking clear and easy to manage, one idea that was suggested was to create two new projects. One for the user stories and one for the bugs.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how best to manage this? The Jira best practices articles don't seem to cover this....

[Jack Brickey · Accepted solution]

Hi Luke, welcome to the Community.

First, IMO, you should be allotting some amount of effort for each sprint to work these other issues least they never get done. And, if that is the case then maybe they aren’t important and should be closed as wont do.

That editorial aside, I would suggest the following options.

• temporary exclusion - have a quick filter to exclude the “less important’ issues
• permanent exclusion - exclude the ‘less important’ from the board filter thus having them never being shown in your board
• 
  now, you will need to figure out how to identify the ‘less important’ issues. Maybe the use of labels.

[Dan Churchill]

Definitely do not create another project.

I think you are mis-understanding some of the basic use cases of Epics and task management in Jira.

An Epic must have user stories, but a user story doesn't have to belong to an epic.

You could have an Epic with 5 user stories. Or you could have a single user story without an Epic.

If you find a bug on a user story, don't add it to the epic, add it as a sub-task on the user story it was found on. This way it can be tracked.