Hierarchy in Jira

[Zach Noyce]

Hey Community!  I am new to JIRA and have been deeply involved in the planning and structure of TFS hierarchies. The paradigm shift to JIRA with my historical EPIC, FEATURE, US, TASK of TFS has thrown me off. Can anyone guide me in how they are utilizing Epics?  I am currently reorganizing backlog structure and would love to hear how others are leveraging their environments. 

I have shifted to JIRA Epics being “features” to encompass the overall body of work and decomposing the user stories leveraging sub-tasks for internal team and tasks for external team. My thoughts are that the subtasks are prerequisites for the closure of stories. The subtasks represent dependencies and items to meet acceptance criteria for validation of completion of the stories. The tasks, on the other hand, are for tracking external team work and validation.  Easier for team to track, for demoing team diligence and ownership. 

Would love to hear your thoughts and guidance. 

Thanks!

[Kat Warner]

Here is a snapshot from our documentation. The Initiative layer becomes available with Jira Portfolio I think.

[Kevin Bui]

Hi @Zach Noyce

I have shifted to JIRA Epics being “features” to encompass the overall body of work and decomposing the user stories leveraging sub-tasks for internal team and tasks for external team. My thoughts are that the subtasks are prerequisites for the closure of stories.

I think this is a viable way of looking at it. I usually think of Epics as being large bodies of work that span multiple sprints, which then break down into mid-level issues (stories, bugs, tasks). I don't use subtasks in my Jira projects, but I've seen other teams get value out of subtasks as a way of tracking each aspect of a Story/Bug/Task. ie: If a task is particularly complex and requires 2 or 3 people to work on different aspects of it.

Atlassian provides some guides on Epics that you might find useful:

• Epics, Stories, Themes, and Initiatives
• Agile Epics: Definition, Examples, & Templates