Transitioning to software change management tool like JIRA, Redmine etc requires to have a good understanding of Issue types. Here is my view, after 15+ years of experience of transforming small, big teams to Agile.
| Epic | Story | Improvement | Bugs | Tasks | Subtasks |
| An epic is a work that encompasses a significant amount of work. | Actionable items and small enough to fit in a sprint. A user story is a common technique to define users, functionality, and benefits. | An improvement or enhancement to an existing feature | Bug is a problem which impairs or prevents the functions of the product | Tasks are broken down sections of a story that describe how the story will be finished | Subtasks can be nested under tasks or user stories |
| May continue for more than one Sprint/Cadence | Completed within sprints/cadence | Completed within sprints/cadence | Completed within sprints/cadence | Completed within sprints/cadence | Completed within sprints/cadence |
| Not clearly understood in terms of customer requirements and should be broken down into stories | SMART principle – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Testable | Not commonly used but use to capture details on the improvement realised during the cadence for future reference | Steps to reproduce is documented | Generally do not lead to code changes. | Split tasks when more than one person need to involve in completing task |
| T-shirt sizing is a common way to size epics | Estimated as story points | Estimated as story points | Estimated as story points | Estimated as story points | Estimated as story points, rolled up in Task estimate |
| Created by Program Manager, Development lead, Subject Matter Experts (e.g. HIPAA, GDPR, PCI ) | Created by Dev/QA Team | Created by Dev/QA Team | Created by Dev/QA Team | Created by Dev/QA Team | Created by Dev/QA Team |
| Build 2-bedrooms, 2 storey house | Build a kitchen, bedroom | Paint mould protection paint on the top of base paint in shower room | Main door misalignment to the frame | Buy kitchen worktop | Cut hole for the sink |
As a caveat, for the large scale enterprise agile teams/organisation, the definition of EPIC will differ. For example, In SAFe EPIC is the gargantuous piece of feature at Portfolio level. Definition above are not intended for large scale Agile teams who implements overarching SAFe framework.
Suraj Gyawali.com 