New to Programs – Confused About Story Point Totals

[Russell Grocott]

We’re new to using Programs in Jira Cloud Premium and have run into something that’s unclear.

Our workflow involves assigning Story Points to Epics for forward-looking capacity planning. As a sprint approaches (usually 1–2 sprints ahead), we break the Epic down into estimated user stories and tasks, then remove the points from the Epic.

I’m currently evaluating whether Programs can support this workflow, but have noticed an inconsistency:

Why are Story Points assigned to Epics included in the “Total Points Allocated” in the Plans Timeline view:



but excluded from the total when viewing the same sprint in the Program view?

Is this expected behaviour, a known bug, or something likely related to configuration?

Appreciate any insights from those familiar with using Programs for capacity planning.

[Mendel Liang]

Hi Russell,

Thanks for giving Programs a try. The Program feature is optimised for planning out Story level work, and Epics are excluded from the calculations regarding capacity when dragged into a particular sprint. As you note, this causes is a difference in behaviour between the capacity calculations that occur on the Timeline and the Program screens.

In effect, dragging an Epic to a column in the Program board is more of a marker for when you might expect the Epic to be completed. To support your use case, the Program board feature would have to be updated to consider work items from different hierarchy levels in a more consistent way, which is relevant to this feature suggestion - which I recommend you vote on in order to signal to our product team what are the highest requested features.

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-93492

As a workaround for your use case, perhaps you could have a related story level issue that contains the placeholder estimates for planning purposes?