Template library / Description presets
A description preset is the body of a single issue — the headings, the acceptance criteria, and the questions a ticket has to answer before anyone can pick it up. Every preset below is markdown you can paste into one issue or apply to every row in a batch. None of them creates an issue; for that you want a task template.
The library holds two different things and people mix them up on first contact, so here is the line in one sentence each.
A user story, a bug report, a definition of done. It fills the description field of an issue that already exists. Answers the question what does this one ticket have to say?
Onboarding, incident response, SOC 2 prep. One epic, its tasks, their subtasks, with a type, an owner, a priority and a date per row. Answers what work is there?
Most teams use both: apply a preset inside a task template and every issue in the tree lands with a written-out description instead of a bare title. The full template library covers what makes a task template survive a real team, and the description-presets guide walks through applying one, filling its variable pills, and pushing it across a whole batch.
User story, bug report and definition of done are the three formats teams argue about, so each has a page of its own covering the variants as well as the body.
The universal agile story format. Captures who needs what and why, with testable acceptance criteria.
Also covers Job Story (JTBD), Epic, Spike.
Read the guideStructured bug report with everything engineers need to reproduce and fix.
Also covers Test Case, QA Checklist, Gherkin Scenarios, Bug Report (Engineering).
Read the guideThe Scrum Guide makes DoD mandatory. Append this checklist to any work item.
Also covers Definition of Done (Engineering).
Read the guide9 formats, every one of them previewable in the app before you apply it. Each links to its own page with the full markdown body.
The universal agile story format. Captures who needs what and why, with testable acceptance criteria.
Reach for it when the ticket describes a change somebody will notice. The format forces you to name who noticed and what is different for them afterwards.
Track and prioritize debt with business impact. Makes invisible cost visible.
For work with no user-visible outcome that keeps losing the prioritisation argument. The impact section is the part that wins it.
The Scrum Guide makes DoD mandatory. Append this checklist to any work item.
Append it rather than replace with it — a DoD is a checklist that sits underneath whatever body the issue already has.
Scaled Agile feature template. Benefit hypothesis ties delivery to business outcomes.
Only if your organisation actually runs SAFe. Outside a PI-planning cadence the benefit hypothesis is ceremony nobody maintains.
Technical work enabling future features — exploration, architecture, infra, compliance.
The SAFe counterpart for work that exists so a later feature can be built: exploration, architecture, infrastructure, compliance groundwork.
Structured bug report with everything engineers need to reproduce and fix.
Use it the moment a bug leaves the reporter's head. The reproduction steps are what decide whether it gets fixed this week or next quarter.
Engineering-grade AC with Happy / Alternative / Error scenarios plus edge cases and out-of-scope.
When the story body is fine but the criteria are a shrug. Happy path, alternative path, error path — then edge cases and what you are explicitly not building.
Generic work item for DevOps, configuration, setup, maintenance.
The default when nothing else fits: infrastructure, configuration, a migration, a chore. Deliberately thin, so it does not pretend the work is a story.
Capture decisions and action items. Turn discussions into trackable work.
For the single issue you open after a meeting. If the meeting produced work for more than one person, extract the actions instead of minuting them.
Starting from raw text rather than a format? Turning meeting notes into Jira tasks is an extraction problem, not a preset one. And once a body is worth keeping, saved templates with variables let a preset carry its own placeholders across projects.
Free 14-day trial on the Atlassian Marketplace. Apply a preset to one issue or to every row in a batch — no setup project, no import wizard.