When to use components vs using stories in a project

[Fred_Schulz]

I've created 3 projects in Jira all of which will contain numerous ongoing technical initiatives that will be further broken down into issues. I'm new at Jira and would like to know if I should be creating these initiatives as components or stories?

[Scott Theus · Accepted solution]

Hi Fred, 

I'd say that a technical initiative is too big for a story; you should at least treat them as epics, and break them down into smaller pieces for the stories. 

Should you use components? Maybe...Does the development of the initiatives cross projects? If you are going to have stories, tasks, epics, etc. for these initiatives in each of the three projects then yes, use complements. If they will be completely separate from each other and have their own projects then use epics and stories to define them. 

-Scott

[Fred_Schulz]

Hi Scott, thank you responding so quickly. I manage a platform engineering team that perform ongoing tasks and am trying to use Jira (1st timer) to manage these tasks. The tasks themselves are not related in any way but may be similar. So i thought I would create 3 projects to combine similar tasks but would  like to further subdivide these tasks into catagories in each of the projects. And this where I am struggling, how to identify these catagories or am i completely in left field on my approach. Your thoughts would be creately appreciated.