Sum up the story points of the stories and assign it to parent epic

[P Vinod Kumar]

I'm currently working on a rule in [your tool, e.g., Jira] that should trigger whenever the story points of any story change. The goal is to recalculate the sum of all story points for the parent epic and update the story points field of the parent epic accordingly.

I've written a rule that triggers without any errors, but unfortunately, the story points field of the epic is not getting updated as expected. Here are the steps I've taken:

• Created a rule that triggers on the change of story points in any story.
• Added an action to sum the story points of all stories under the parent epic.
• Set the calculated sum to update the story points field of the parent epic.

Despite these steps, the epic's story points field remains unchanged. Has anyone encountered a similar issue or can provide guidance on what might be going wrong? Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

[Trudy Claspill · Accepted solution]

Hello @P Vinod Kumar 

In order to help you debug your rule please provide screen images for the following:

1. Your entire rule showing all the steps in order.
2. The details of each step
3. All the details from the rule audit log entry from a time when the rule ran and the Epic field did not update as you expected.

[P Vinod Kumar]

Please find the screen shot

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @P Vinod Kumar 

Adding to the suggestions from @Trudy Claspill ...

Please also describe which version of Jira you are using: Cloud, Server, or Data Center.  The different versions have different automation features, and those impact how to solve summing a field from child to parent work items.

Kind regards,
Bill

[P Vinod Kumar]

[P Vinod Kumar]

The Jira version is Cloud

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @P Vinod Kumar 

The smart value you are using in the Edit action is not valid.

Please refer to the Template Automation Rule available for summing story points to a parent issue, which will provide you with a proven way to accomplish your requirement.

Note that if you want the rule to run only for Stories and their parents you will need to add in the condition you are using in your rule.

[P Vinod Kumar]

It worked. Thanks for the template info. Will it still work if I delete the story instead of changing the Story point value.

[Bill Sheboy]

No, and...there are several cases to consider, perhaps requiring additional rules with different triggers.  It depends upon how accurately and when you want the parent epic's value updated.  For example:

• when the Story Points change... (your current case)
• when a work item is created as a new child to a parent
• when an existing work item is added to a parent
• when an existing work item is removed from a parent
• when an existing work item changes parents
• when a work item with a parent is deleted
• when someone manually alters the epic's value, should it re-calculate?
• when Atlassian has an outage preventing rules from running (i.e., some rules do not run to "catch up" after an outage); this may be mitigated with a scheduled trigger rule
• when the site exceeds the automation usage limits, and rules stop running
• etc.