User story vs. New Feature

Eugene November 16, 2012

The question is about types of issues.

When it's better to use User Story and when to use New Feature. What's the difference?

And can User Story contain several New Features or only Tasks?

Do you link them or how you see the mapping to all the tasks associated with a User Story?

I just want to understand which types of issues to leave in JIRA and in what cases I have to use them.

Thanks.

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Norman Abramovitz
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November 16, 2012

The short answer is whatever makes sense to your team. The issue types are just labels. You can create additional labels for issues. It is your team's definition of those labels that matters. There is no reason why an 'User Story' cannot have both 'New Features' and 'Tasks' related issues.

Eugene November 17, 2012

Norman, thanks for taking time for the reply. Thas makes sense.

But ...

We use rapid board (kanban) in our process. And if the User Story will contain both New Features and Tasks how not to lost them all while resolving? It's good to create a Task and then related subtasks, then it's attached to the view task page and one can see all subtasks. How to do this in case of User Story or New Feature? (So under New Feature I can see the related tasks and progress of these tasks?)

Norman Abramovitz
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November 17, 2012

You use issue linking to maintain the relationships. Maybe reading this previous answer will help you understand better. It is the section about breaking down stories that relates to your question.

https://answers.atlassian.com/questions/72394/manage-epic-stories-in-jira-greenhopper

So if I understand your example

User Story 1

related to link to New Feature 1

User Story 2

related to link Task 2

Subtask 2-1

related to link Task1

Subtask 1-1

You can use one of the issue hierachy plugins or define a naming convention to help maintain the hierachy (new field or add to the summary field)

Eugene November 21, 2012

Thanks for the advice. This helps. :)

Eliah Ninyo April 26, 2021

it has been a while from this question, but i still don't understand what is better. 

i'm talking about sprint planning and not Kanban.

for epic, i can create any kind of issue under it (bug, task, story or feature). 

under story or feature i can create only sub-tasks. i can not create tasks (or any other issue type). 

in general, as far as i know, a story is something that shall finish in one sprint. feature can have multiply stories and can finish in couple of sprint. 

the problem is i can add to sprints only issues that are not sub-tasks. the worst thing is when i add feature or story it adds all their sub-tasks. i can not remove or filter some of the sub tasks to next sprint.

this make my sprint board very messy since it includes sub-tasks that are not going to be part of the current spring. 

what do you suggest in this case?

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