How to handle estimates when dealing with subtasks?

Mircea Braescu

Let's take the following situation:

• A couple of devs estimate an issue at 100h and set the Original Estimate and Time remaining fields.
• The estimate is accepted and the issue is Selected for Development
• The devs then break down the issue into subtasks (front-end, back-end, testing etc), as they go along, and they estimate each subtask with the time required

What happens then is that whatever estimates they have set on the subtasks get added, not substracted, to the parent issue.

At that point when someone will open the parent issue they will see a mess (such as 2x the original estimate),

What is the best way to handle this situation?

Ste Wright

Hi @Mircea Braescu 

I would have both the original estimates and tracked time on the sub-task level or the parent-level - not both.

When you check Include subtasks it pulls both the estimates and time entered from the sub-task layer and summaries it up to the parent.

But this does not replace the ability to separately track time at the story-level. If you enter the Original Estimate at story-level, you also need to track Time Spent here. You can't (for example) have the Original Estimate on the story-level impacted by the Time Spent from the sub-task level.

With this in mind, if you are going to estimate sub-tasks I would avoid setting the time estimates at story-level.

Ste