Summarizing story points from sub-tasks in parent task

Marco Reinli

We are currently estimating our work on a sub-task level by using story points. The user story (or other issue type) has no story points if it has sub-tasks. If there are no sub-tasks, then we add the user stories to the story itself.

We split user stories into front- and backend sub-tasks. The assignee of the sub-task then estimates during sprint planning and the user story is added as a whole to the sprint. This increases the sprint scope by the sum of both sub-tasks.

Is it possible to display the sum of all story points of sub-tasks and display it on the sprint board and backlog?

Also, it seems that the Epic report only works with story points on the user story level and not sub-task level. Stories that have sub-tasks with story points are shown as unestimated. Any idea how to best report on Epic progress with the described approach? How are you storing the estimated story points when working with sub-tasks?

Earl McCutcheon

Hi Marco, 

This comes up quite a bit, but to summarize story point estimation is expected at the story level and time estimates at the sub-task level. The native sum up options will sum the time tracking of the sub-task to the story and to do this set the Remaining estimate and time spent value as covered here:

• Configuring estimation and tracking

Also there is some more detail on this in "Estimating an issue" towards the bottom in an expandable section titled "Why not estimate on subtasks and roll that up for Velocity and Commitment?"

Additionally, the following posts discuss story point summation to the parent in even more detail:

• https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-questions/Story-Point-Estimates-in-Sub-Tasks/qaq-p/284987
• https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Software-questions/Story-points-subtasks-gt-burndown-chart/qaq-p/178924
• https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Core-questions/Parent-story-does-not-add-story-point-from-eash-sub-task/qaq-p/348431

So its not expected behavior and you would need to look into an add-ons to get this to occur, and I know there are some examples of doing this in ScriptRunner such as the following Post which gives an example on how to do this via a scripted field, however Cloud does not support the functions that allow Script Runner to add field types to it as it does on Server, and I am not aware of an add-on in cloud that does this:

• https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-questions/Script-to-calculate-sum-between-parent-issue-and-subtasks/qaq-p/735469

Regards,
Earl