If you put estimates on an Epic, will the User Stories below it be duplicate work?

[Nicole Durante]

If you decided to estimate an Epic, would the user stories be counted twice and would it mess up the calculation of your story points? 

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

They could be, yes, it's up to your process as to how you accumulate and/or report on them.

A typical strategy for estimating on Epics is to not do it at all.  Use an automation or script to add up all the estimates on all the linked stories.

[Harry Knott]

I find it baffling that there isn't a standard way of managing this in JIRA.  Surely the most common starting point is an epic with some kind of high level sizing - so starting out with a high level estimate makes sense.  Then when you break down individual stories, these should be a more complete estimate - but will double-count some or all of the estimate on the epic.

I would expect something along the lines of 

* Starting with estimates taken from the epic

* At some mid-point I may have some detail in the estimates for stories - but this is incomplete, so my best estimate is still the one on the epic

* When the breakdown of stories is complete, the best estimate is the sum of the estimates on the stories

Yes, of course I can implement some custom functionality, and script this up - but isn't everyone trying to solve the same problem here?  Why not have a standard way of dealing with it and leave scripting for people who want to do something non-standard?  

As-is, I don't see any way of using epic estimates in a logical way without having to update the estimates on the epic every time you put an estimate on a story