Structure JIRA with Epics, User Stories & Co

[Thilo]

Hey guys. I couldn't find a similar question that's why I'll just write mine and hope you can give me a lot of positive feedback.

My team consists of one iOS and one Android developer as well as me as product owner.

Our JIRA issue types are structured in "App Tasks" which are basically features and "Bugs". So far we haven't worked with Epics and User Stories.

Let's say I have one epic that I need to split into user stories. What's the smartest way?

• Option #1: Should the epic be a "App task" (feature) issue type and the user stories subtasks?
• Option #2: Should we create two issue types called "Epic" and "User Story" and then just connect both?

What's making it complicated is that a subtask can't have further subtasks. So in case we use option #1 we can't go deeper in case we need it.

The second part of the challenge: So far we used subtasks to split issue types into iOS and Android. So each developer could track their progress and also move the ticket on our (Kanban) board according. How would you recommend to handle this in the agile workflow?

[Callum Carlile _Automation Consultants_ · Accepted solution]

Hi @Thilo 

Epics shouldn't so much be used to log work within the ticket's description, as they should be to group issues that are all contributing to the same goal. At companies I have worked at, we have often used Epics as a group of features/bugs. For example, there could be an Epic called 'Improve Performance', or 'Improve conversion rates' which could each contain 'x' amount Bugs and 'y' amount of Stories, and these individual issues will be contributing to that specific epic.

Issues can be added to the epic directly within the epic's issue screen, or alternatively, an issue can be added to an Epic directly through the individual issue, by searching for the Epic's jira issue number to the 'Epic Link' field (this may need to be added to the issue screen if you can't see it). Also bear in mind that in Jira, a single issue can only be assigned to one epic.

In this sense, every issue that is within this epic is essentially a sub-task of the epic's overall goal (then each of these individual issues can have sub-tasks under them within Jira).

We use the 'Story' issue type to represent features, and a common set-up of a story issue type is;

As a [user]
I want to [achieve this goal]
So that [I can have this benefit]

For example, if I was making a website, a typical user story would be;

As a customer
I want to be able to log in to my account
So that I can see my account details

Regarding tracking iOS and Android issues, I would suggest adding iOS and Android components to the corresponding issues. On Kanban boards, you have Quick Filters, which can be manually created based off jql queries. In this case, you would have somewhere in your jql query component = Android or component = iOS, which can be used with other variabled also (e.g. project = ABC AND component = Android AND assignee = currentUser() ) <-- This would filter out issues in the ABC project, that have the android component and that are assigned to whoever is looking at the filter at the time.

Hope this helps! If you have nay more questions feel free to message me directly or take a look at https://www.automation-consultants.com/agile-consultancy/

[Thilo]

Hi Callum.

Thank you for the quick reply. I noticed that so far our backlog just has the "versions" but not "epics"-panel. From there it makes sense what you said.

With our current board settings it's a little bit confusing.

Cheers.