Bug? Workload by Assignee dialog totals wrong

Question

Hi. Is this a Jira bug or just bad practice?
When calculating the Remaining Time Estimate, the Workload by Assignee dialog (In the Backlog view, click the "..." in the sprint header) is not counting issues assigned to you that are subtasks of a story that is assigned to someone else. Furthermore, when showing your totals, it's counting subtasks assigned to someone else in stories that belong to you.

Example 1: Story ABC has two subtasks. There are 0 hours logged for the story itself, but 8 hours assigned to me in Subtask 1 and 16 hours assigned to John Smith in Subtask 2. The dialog shows I have 3 days remaining time for that story.

Example 2: I have 3 stories assigned to me for this sprint, totaling 40 hours. But John Smith has a story assigned to him and he added a subtask for 16 hours and assigned it to me. The dialog shows that I have 40 hours remaining.

Bug? Got a workaround? Thanks

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

No, it is correct.  The estimates are for an issue.

One reason is works this way is what sub-tasks are for in Scrum - nothing.  In Scrum, you commit to doing a set of stories in a sprint.  You can break them up with sub-tasks if you want, but those are irrelevant to measuring what you deliver during the Sprint - burndown and sprint metrics only care about your delivery vs committment and that's purely looking at the stories you said you would do, not fragments of them.

So, the allocation report you're looking at is looking at the issue(story) level because that's what matters to a sprint.  It's irrelevant if sub-tasks have been allocated to other people, the reporting is telling you about what you committed to vs done, and the estimates are at that level.

Steve Fogel_3cp22a · Answer

Thanks for your answer. I believe that this is just plain wrong and should be considered a bug. I should be able to assign sub tasks to stories, and should be able to assign different sub tasks to different people. As it is now, that dialog is useless for managing capacity as you start to assign issues to people during the sprint planning meeting.

Given that we use sub tasks as I explained, If I were to depend on the numbers In the dialog to judge if resources are evenly allocated in a sprint, some people would be over-allocated and some under.

Do you have suggestions for how to best use this dialog and what features or add-ons to use to accurately track capacity during sprint planning meetings? Thanks.

P.S. how does one actually report a bug to Atlassian?

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

Ahh, the perils of estimating on sub-tasks!

In both of your examples, the display is correct.  The important piece here is that the estimates are for the issues, not the person the issue is assigned to.

Let me explain by re-wording your first example a bit:

Example 1: Story ABC has two subtasks. There are 0 hours logged for the story itself, but 8 hours on Subtask 1 and 16 hours on Subtask 2. The dialog shows that the issue has 3 days remaining time for that story.

That's the basis it is doing the workload calculations on - the estimates are for the issues and then for each person, not fragments of the issues (sub-tasks)