Epics, as you might imagine, are large stories. We want them to be able to be completed, so it's important that they have a distinct start and end, just like any story. We like to think of epics as something that would span multiple sprints, versus a story, which could be completed within a sprint. Epics are not groupings of work items, which is a common mistake that people make when organizing their work in the JIRA interface. We'll take a look at how to use components and labels to do this, instead of epics. Epics will contain stories, bugs, and tasks.

Stories are smaller than epics. Stories, bugs, and tasks are all on the same level hierarchically; they could all be prioritized against one another within our backlog to include in a sprint. Stories are also known as user stories, and they're called that because they...

In this section, we're going to cover issue type attributes, how to add them, and how to remove them.

First, we're going to learn about what the different kinds of attributes are that can be assigned to stories, tasks, and bugs. Then, we're going to talk more about how we can customize them and adjust the screen so that we can only see the ones that we want to see.

The following are the attributes that are available to us:

• Assignee: This is the person that is responsible for that item.
• Attachments: These are anything that needs to be attached to that item to provide more clarity or show that it's been done.
• Comments: These are used to add our views and feedback or to track progress against the work item.
• Component/s: These are groupings, and are used to group items together within a project.
• Description: This...

In this section, we're going to learn about managing the items in our backlog.

Here, we will learn about the following:

• How to create items
• How to prioritize items
• How to assign items into epics and versions
• How to create and use quick filters in our board view
• Separating work that's fully refined and ready for a sprint

Let's go back to our backlog and view our work items. It's really easy to prioritize these items in JIRA. All we have to do is drag and drop them in the order we want. This makes it really easy for our product owners to just move all of this stuff around so that it's exactly how they think it should be in order to deliver the most value.

We made an epic previously, and as we can see in the following screenshot, we've got My Test Epic. We want to assign some items to this—maybe all of the newest...

In this section, we're going to learn how to create and configure our board, and so we're going to talk about the following:

• The differences between a virtual scrum board and an actual scrum board
• The columns that represent workflow states, and how to modify a workflow
• Swimlanes
• Estimation options – time versus story points

Let's go ahead and go over to JIRA. We can see that we've actually taken the backlog items that were not in our ready sprint and pulled them into Sprint 0. This will eventually be the sprint that we'll put on our sprint board, but in the meantime, we have to get our board ready. In preparation for our sprint, we've assigned story point values to each of these stories. It is very important that we assign the sizing before we start a sprint, as it will represent the commitment. We are...

Let's talk about what we learned in this chapter. We talked about what epics, stories, bugs, and tasks are, how to use each of them, and why we use one versus the other. We learned about the different work item attributes that are available to us, then learned what they are, and how to add or remove them so that we can configure JIRA to meet the needs of our team. Then, we learned how to manage the items that are in our backlog using prioritization, assigning to epics and versions, and more. Finally, we talked about what a board is, how to configure that board so that the workflow matches our workflow, and how to effectively manage those items as they go through a sprint.

In the next chapter, we're going to go ahead and start our first sprint.