How to exclude Story Points of Cancelled Tasks from Sprint Report?

Question

Hello.

My squad are estimating tasks in Story Points and we usually plan certain amount each sprint. At the end of each sprint I collect metrics of how much we planned vs how much we actually mananged to complete. Sometimes tasks get cancelled and, if I want them not to drag on from sprint to sprint (as I have seen explained in other thread), I set resolution and move the task to the last column to the right. However, if we do this, I can see that the Story points are added to "Completed issues" at the end of the sprint and I want Cancelled tasks not to be included.

Is there any way to have them excluded or any other place apart from Sprint report, where I can check total amount of SP that were actually Done?

Thank you.

Bill Sheboy · Answer

Hi @Austeja Taraile

I am guessing that you tried to solve this by adding a Cancelled status.  That will certainly cause problems, as you have seen when trying to move items to the last column on the board (done/completed). This is why I was suggesting using a Label value or a custom field instead of a status to indicate "cancelled".

Noting that you want to see these cancelled items on the board and not include them in reporting, I do not believe that is possible.  The board filter determines what is in the reports: there is no way to show them on the board and not report on them.

One option is to include everything on the board (cancelled or not) with the filter, and then change the filter to remove cancelled when you want to do reporting.  I would not recommend that approach as this could confuse the team using the board.

__Bill

Austeja Taraile · Answer

Hi Bill,

Thank you for the response. I would still like to see them, but not have them included in the calculations. Also, when I excluded Cancelled Items from the query, weird things started happening - when I move a subtask in swimlanes to the final column to the "cancelled" section, if I don't have Cancelled items filtered out, JIRA asks me if I want to update main Task as well and I can update it accordingly. However, if I filter Cancelled items out, the subtask hides itself and the main task just appears to not have any sub-tasks at all. Then I have to go manually to cancel that as well. And that's not very user friendly :(

Bill Sheboy · Answer

Hi @Austeja Taraile -- Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

Yes, you can exclude those.

The filter for a board determines what is shown/included in the reporting.  If you have a way to distinguish the cancelled items, modify the filter to exclude them.

This could be label or something like a custom field.  Our teams have added a custom field of Cancelled to indicate such work that we have abandoned.

Best regards,

Bill