Issues and issue types

Every unit of work in Jira, such as a story or an epic, is uniformly referred to as an issue. Each issue has a field called issue type, which represents the type and purpose of the issue. For example, in a Scrum project, we would have the following issue types by default:

• Epic: This represents a big user story that has not been broken down into finer-grained requirements. In Jira, epics are usually used to define the "theme" for several stories that will be part of it, as well as modules or major components in a big development project.
• Story: This represents a single feature to be implemented. It is usually used to capture requirements from the end user's perspective. For this reason, stories are often written in nontechnical language and focusing on the desired results of the feature.
• Bug: This represents a defect or problem that needs to be fixed in the product.
• Task: This represents a generic task that is not a bug or a story, but which needs to be completed.

As we will see in later chapters, you can customize the list of issue types for your project to adapt to your project requirements better.