Issue types and subtasks

As seen earlier, issues in JIRA can represent many things ranging from software development tasks to project management milestones. Issue type is what differentiates one kind of issue from another.

Each issue has a type (therefore, the name issue type), which is represented by the issue type field. This lets you know what type of issue it is, and also helps you determine many other aspects of it, such as what fields will be displayed for this issue.

JIRA comes with a set of default issue types, as shown in the following table:

Issue type

Description

Bug

A problem that impairs or prevents the functions of the product

Improvement

An enhancement to an existing feature

New feature

A new feature of the product

Task

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