Issue types
Issue types distinguish different types of work in unique ways, and help you identify, categorize, and report on your team’s work across your Jira site. They can help your team build more structure into your working process.
Multiple issue types help you search and sort the work your team takes on, track the progress of specific types of work, even estimate how well your team responds to bugs or how fast they complete larger initiatives.
Each Jira product comes with default issue types to suit the needs of your projects and teams. You can customize your issue types to match any method of project management you want.We provide suggested issue types to help you classify tasks to work in common agile software development or IT service management methods. Get started with these default issue types or create your own.
What are parent, standard, and child issues?
Depending on the complexity of the projects you track in Jira, you may want to group or nest different work items hierarchically. This can help your teams sweat the details on individual tasks while Scrum masters, project managers, or other team leaders track your team's bigger picture.
By default, Jira supports three levels of hierarchy:
- Parent issues (or epic issues) represent high-level initiatives or bigger pieces of work in Jira. For software teams, a parent issue (or epic issue) may represent a new feature they're developing. For IT service teams, parent issues may represent a major service change or upgrade. For business teams, parent issue may represent major deliverables or phases of a project.
- Standard issues represent regular business tasks. In Jira, standard issues are where daily work is discussed and carried out by team members. For software teams, standard issues (like bugs or stories) estimate and track the effort required to build an interaction or other end goal in your team's software. For service teams, standard issues represent different requests made by your team's customers, like requesting service or support, or reporting problems or incidents with your infrastructure. For business teams, standard issues represent and track your team member's daily tasks.
- When needed, child issues (or subtask issues) can help your team break a standard issue into smaller chunks. This can be helpful if your team underestimates the scope or complexity of their work. Child issues (or subtask issues) can be described and estimated separately to their related standard issue and can help your team better understand and estimate similar work in the future.
Default issue types
Here's a list of the default issue types that come with each Jira product:
Jira Work Management (business projects) issue types
By default, business projects come with one standard issue type:
Task
A task represents work that needs to be done.
By default, business projects come with one child issue type:
Subtask
A subtask is a piece of work that is required to complete a task.
Jira Software (software projects) issue types
By default, software projects come with one parent issue type:
Epic
A big user story that needs to be broken down. Epics group together bugs, stories, and tasks to show the progress of a larger initiative. In agile development, epics usually represent a significant deliverable, such as a new feature or experience in the software your team develops.
By default, software projects come with three standard issue types:
Bug
A bug is a problem which impairs or prevents the functions of a product.
Story
A user story is the smallest unit of work that needs to be done.
Task
A task represents work that needs to be done.
By default, software projects come with one child issue type:
Subtask
A subtask is a piece of work that is required to complete a task. Subtasks issues can be used to break down any of your standard issues in Jira (bugs, stories or tasks).
Jira Service Management (service projects) issue types
Change
Requesting a change in the current IT profile.
IT help
Requesting help for an IT related problem.
Incident
Reporting an incident or IT service outage.
New feature
Requesting new capability or software feature.
Problem
Investigating and reporting the root cause of multiple incidents.
Service request
Requesting help from an internal or customer service team.
Service request with approval
Requesting help that requires a manager or board approval.
Support
Requesting help for customer support issues.