JIRA and tasks

Is this a question/concern originating from the team?

I ask, because of the way your question is phrased around "managing work at a task level".   I am assuming that no one outside of the Development Team is attempting to "manage" the work being done by the Development Team?

Also, it is a preference of mine (rooted in the Scrum Guide) that task completion is not something to be tracked.   Scrum only cares about completed items.   It does not matter if 4 out of the 5 tasks for an item are completed - the overall item is still incomplete and cannot be "potentially delivered" until the entire item is complete.

Godon, in JIRA, the team can easily create subtasks for each story pulled into sprint. The story can stay In Progress from the moment the first dev subtask is started until all subtasks are completed; at that point, once can move the story to In Test, or whatever workflow you have running.

"Then in Sprint Planning ensuring all tasks are identified and estimated in hours - its a recipe for success."

Not really:

• You can't actually ensure all tasks are identified in sprint planning. Most of them, yes, but in my experience, is is unreasonable to think or otherwise expect all tasks to be identified.
• Tasks may be estimated in hours or not estimated at all. Up to the team to decide what works best

"the burn down is based on story points"

Why would you be interested in any other type of burndown when that doesn't tell you much? Is the sprint goal linked to the subtasks (tasks) or the actual stories?

We only use Jira to manage our stories.  We use physical boards (i.e. painters tape on a wall, 1 post-it note per task) to manage the work.  Our teams like this better because it is easy to add/remove tasks as new info is discovered, there is a very visual element to see the work flowing, it adds transparency to our work for others.  We track the stories in Jira because it is tooled for that.  However very few of our teams even look at the burn down charts.  We track our productivity based on the continual delivery of value to our stakeholders (internal and external) because that is more important than doing bunch of tasks.  Tasks are just a means to the end.

Now, I will admit that all of our teams are currently co-located.  We have had a couple of teams in the past where we had remote workers. When that occurred, we did sub-tasks in Jira. But again, we didn't monitor completion of tasks. We monitored delivery of value.