Guidance on using stories VS tasks

Daniel Tan
Contributor
February 3, 2022

We are an application maintenance team and primary work on BAU support and implementing minor enhancements. We are not a software development team.

We use Kanban boards and not Scrum boards.

Could you please explain the difference between a JIRA story and a task and how they should be used.

Example 1 - Work item "Create report A". Should this be a story or a task?

Example 2 - In EPIC "Upgrade Application A to V1.1", there is a work item "Regression test Report A". Should that work item be a story or a task?

I'd appreciate examples of how you've used epics, stories and tasks in your JIRA project

Thank you

Dan

 

 

3 answers

2 accepted

Comments for this post are closed

Community moderators have prevented the ability to post new answers.

Post a new question

5 votes
Answer accepted
Peter DeWitt
Community Leader
Community Leader
Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
February 3, 2022

@Daniel Tan , There are so many ways of using this issue types. The crappy answer is that you can use them for whatever you want. However, here is a bit of advice from my years working:

task - something that takes minutes to complete

story - something that takes hours to complete

epic - the equivalent of a project containing stories and tasks. Takes days to complete.

-pjd

Daniel Tan
Contributor
February 3, 2022

Thanks Peter - I'm always in favour of pragmatic solutions :)

Like # people like this
Valera
Contributor
October 2, 2023

Well, time criteria in defying the type of your work does not seem credible. Why would we even spend time on creating a new task that would take minutes to complete?

(User) stories are for feature and functionalities of the software being developed, bug reports are for bugs, tasks are for other project works, such as documentation, planning, reporting, prepare release, architectural design, database design, etc  Some of those can be subtasks to bug reports and user stories.

Developer tasks, user stories, product bugs.

Like # people like this
3 votes
Answer accepted
Jack Brickey
Community Leader
Community Leader
Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
February 3, 2022

Technically, underlying Jira behaviors treat tasks and stories the same. There is no difference, it is simply a name. It is left to the users to decide when they use one vs. the other. 

Stories are traditionally associated with agile methodologies and especially scrum.   But you can just as readily use tasks.

Daniel Tan
Contributor
February 3, 2022

Thank you Jack

Like JoMi likes this
YOWfactor
I'm New Here
I'm New Here
Those new to the Atlassian Community have posted less than three times. Give them a warm welcome!
September 26, 2023

@Jack Brickey - if I wanted to keep things as simple as possible I'd tend to either only use story or task with sub tasks if necessary. A purely semantic differentiation could be to use story only for user stories in software development and task for (administrative) ToDos in any kind of project (like setup software xyz or organize a workshop). What do you think?

Jack Brickey
Community Leader
Community Leader
Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
September 26, 2023

It really is personal preference but indeed for a true Software project I use Story for use cases for desired functionality and reserve tasks for issues that don't translate to modifying the product. For example - Review document would be a task.

Like # people like this
6 votes
Valera
Contributor
October 2, 2023

(User) stories are for feature and functionalities of the software being developed, bug reports are for bugs, tasks are for other project works, such as documentation, planning, reporting, prepare release, architectural design, database design, etc  Some of those can be subtasks to bug reports and user stories.

Developer tasks, user stories, product bugs.

DEPLOYMENT TYPE
CLOUD
PRODUCT PLAN
PREMIUM
TAGS
AUG Leaders

Atlassian Community Events