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We just started using Jira (with the Jira Agile plugin - Scrum template) for our issue tracker and agile planning.

I am confused about the difference (or intended difference) between story and improvement. All our "stuff" is written as stories. Those stories describe both new functionality and improvements to existing functionality. Should those all be listed as a Story or should the improvements be listed as an Improvement?

I think we should keep things simple and just have Epic, Story, Bug; however, I don't want to hide Improvement and end up with some unintended effects or end up missing useful functionality.

Thanks in advance for your advice.

Daniel Serodio
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Kyle West
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    Can you tell me how you can work out your velocity if you are using 'story points' for stories but 'time estimates' for bugs and improvements? – Mark E Mar 15 '11 at 16:48
  • We're pretty small so we haven't gotten into that yet -- we just watch the burndown chart by issue count. A new question is probably the best place to find an answer to your question. – Kyle West Apr 06 '11 at 16:06

2 Answers2

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We use "improvement" for functionality improvements in user stories delivered in previous sprints. In other words we use "story" for new user centric functionality and "improvement" for functionality improvements of current features and non-user centric functionality.

hope it helps

Mark Kofman
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  • seems reasonable, that is what I did. This way we can look for improvements vs. new features. – Kyle West Dec 30 '10 at 23:02
  • What Issue Type do you use, by the way, for "non-user centric functionality" ? Task does not seem right to me. Would you use "New Feature" ? – HeyWatchThis Sep 02 '13 at 22:08
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Just as an addition to a previous answer I would also suggest to add a new JIRA issue linking e.g. "improvements"-"is improvement of" so that every time you add an improvement you can link it with related story with this link. This will allow you to track how particular functionality was changing over the time when the amount of stories and improvements will significantly increase.

Alexey Andrushkevich
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