What are work types?
Work types distinguish different categories of work.
They 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 work types to suit the needs of your projects and teams. You can customize your work types to match any method of project management you want.
We provide suggested work types to help you classify work in common agile software development or IT service management methods. Get started with these default work types or create your own.
Parent and child work items
Parent and child are terms that describe a type of relationship between work items:
A parent is a work item that sits above another work item e.g. a task that’s made up of subtasks.
A child is a work item that sits below another work item e.g. a subtask that belongs to a task.
This means that the parent and child relationship isn’t limited to specific work types. Rather, any work type can be both a parent and a child work item — the only exception being subtasks, which can only be a child since there aren’t any work types below it in the hierarchy.
For example, if you have this work item hierarchy:
Epic
Story, Task, Bug
Subtask
Then:
As a parent work item, an epic can have stories, tasks, and bugs as child work items.
As a parent work item, a task can have subtasks as child work items.
A subtask can’t have any child work items.
Best practices
Since a work item can only display up to 500 child work items, we recommend limiting your work items to that amount. If a work item exceeds 500 child work items:
Instead of viewing your child work items from the parent work item, you’ll have to view them in search — which you can go to straight from the parent work item.
If you use time tracking, you won’t be able to include subtasks.
Pro tip: To reduce your number of child work items, try splitting the parent work item. For example, if an epic has too many tasks, it might be a sign that your epic can be split into multiple epics. Or if a task has too many subtasks, it might deserve to be split into multiple tasks. Find out more about structuring work for your agile team.
Work type hierarchy levels
By default, Jira supports three levels of hierarchy:
Epic work items, which represent high-level initiatives or bigger pieces of work in Jira. For software teams, an epic may represent a new feature they're developing. For IT service teams, epics may represent a major service change or upgrade. For business teams, epics may represent major deliverables or phases of a project.
Standard work items represent regular business tasks. In Jira, standard work items are where daily work is discussed and carried out by team members. For software teams, standard work items (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 work items 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 work items represent and track your team member's daily tasks.
Subtask work items, which can help your team break a standard work item into smaller chunks. This can be helpful if your team has a task that requires multiple people working on it, or if your team underestimates the scope or complexity of their work. Subtasks can be described and estimated separately to their related standard work item and can help your team better understand and estimate similar work in the future.
The work type hierarchy settings allow you to manage the default hierarchy levels for work types in Jira. Jira Premium and Enterprise customers can also create additional levels in their work type hierarchy. Find out more about managing the work type hierarchy.
If you use Advanced Roadmaps, additional hierarchy levels can allow you to track your organization’s larger initiatives in your plans and unify cross-project work. Find out more about configuring the work type hierarchy in Advanced Roadmaps.
Default work types
Here's a list of the default work types that come with each Jira product:
Business project work types
By default, business projects come with one standard work type:
Task
A task represents work that needs to be done.
By default, business projects come with one child work type:
Subtask
A subtask is a piece of work that is required to complete a task.
Software project work types
By default, software projects come with one parent work 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 work 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 work type:
Subtask
A subtask is a piece of work that is required to complete a task. Subtask work items can be used to break down any of your standard work items in Jira (bugs, stories or tasks).
Jira Service Management (service projects) work 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.
Was this helpful?