Task weighting

[Duygu İskender]

How can we specify the difficulty of the task? And how can we get a report accordingly.

[Hamza Chundrigar · Accepted solution]

Hi @Duygu İskender 

Welcome to the Atlassian community.

One can deconstruct a lot from this question so apologies for the wall of text but I hope you find it useful.

How can we specify the difficulty of the task? And how can we get a report accordingly?

There are a number of ways one might approach this. But I would say try making good and proper use of story points. I use the word "proper" because story points are often misused. 

Story points represent the amount of work, complexity, and risks one needs to complete or implement a work item. 

In the words of Atlassian:

Teams assign story points relative to work complexity, the amount of work, and risk or uncertainty. Values are assigned to more effectively break down work into smaller pieces, so they can address uncertainty. Over time, this helps teams understand how much they can achieve in a period of time and builds consensus and commitment to the solution. It may sound counter-intuitive, but this abstraction is actually helpful because it pushes the team to make tougher decisions around the difficulty of work.

A popular approach to estimating story points is by using a technique called Planning Poker.

There are many different ways to track your progress and report on the work. I don't think there's a reason to talk about 3rd party options (right now) if Jira's (and other Atlassian core products') native functionalities and features satisfy your requirements. So I'll provide some commentary on the same with respect to reporting via native features.

JIRA provides different types of reports within a project depending on your needs/use-cases. It helps to analyze progress, perform issue analysis, oversee roadblocks, and do forecasting (amongst other things).

Here's a pretty comprehensive list of Atlassian resource you can check out that shows you how to track and analyze your team's work with reports

For example:

• You might use Jira's Sprint Report. This would help you to visualize how your team is doing relative to where they are in the sprint. It allows you to see a list of your high-priority incomplete issues, which you can use to discuss in your standups whether you’re working on the right things in the right order. It's also quite useful for retrospective conversations where you can dig deeper into what issues were incomplete that were carried over to the next sprint, why it happened, allowing you to course correct for future sprints.
• You could potentially use Jira Dashboards, if say, you wanted to see the sum of story points per assignee. This community post discusses a way to show that visualization in the form of a Jira Dashboard gadget.
• You could also export a JQL query to a spreadsheet if you wanted to build out a custom report (without using a paid add-on) although this might end up being tedious depending on how complex your requirements are and how many times you'll need to perform this.
• You could also use automation for Jira to create a report with total story points per project stage — as shown by Bill Sheboy.

I would say that even if you're using story points, but you need to report on the actual level of effort (i.e. time in man hours) that is spent on working on issues – then in that case I would suggest that your team logs in the amount of time spent (in seconds, minutes, hours, days) working on those items of work. You would also be able to generate a report on that. Many teams use both story points and the log work option as they technically serve two different purposes, so you don't need to worry about contradictions.

Hope that provided you with some food for thought.

Cheers,

Hamza