Visibility to issues with recently updated story points

Question

How can I see a list of issues in a project with recently updated story points? I'm fine amending a report, dashboard widget, or using issue search with JQL, just can't quite get to what I need, which is visibility to how many points we add to our backlog each week (which is not the same as the number of issues we add to the backlog).

Thanks!

Mykenna Cepek · Accepted Answer

I'm not aware of anything in the standard product that will total the Story Points in the backlog.

Maybe there's a Marketplace App that could help with this; I can't advise on that.

It would be helpful to know if you're wanting to do this for Company-Managed Project, Team-Managed Projects, or both.

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A simple, but manual, approach would be to have a saved Filter to generate a list of all issues in the backlog, import into Excel, and sum the Story Points column manually. Not pretty, but would only take a few minutes once each week to do manually.

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You could also explore Jira Automation as an option to help with this. There are some tricky points, but it might work for your use-case.

Ideally, this rule would compute the Story Point total in your Backlog, and can even email it to you weekly (or daily!), or send via a Slack or Teams message.

However, creating this rule will have a few tricky spots to work out...

One is exactly how to detect an "issue in the Backlog". Sounds trivial. But it actually differs between Scrum and Kanban board in Jira. Issues tracked on Scrum boards are in the Backlog when the Sprint field does not contain an open sprint value. Issues tracked on Kanban board are in the Backlog based on the Status field.

Another tricky aspect is handling the likely large number of issues in your backlog. If it's under 100, you're golden. More likely you have over 100 issues in your Backlog, and this will add some complexity to the rule. This is because the Issue Lookup feature has a limit of 100 results.

The magic here would be to use something like this:

to create partial sums (of 100 issues or less), and then add all those together. Note that this cannot currently be done in a loop in automation.

If you want to explore this approach, I recommend posting a new question focusing on Automation -- something like "Automation to sum Backlog Story Points".