Excessive negative SP crash backlog

Question

An issue with story points of `-1e40` crashes the backlog, until the issue is edited back to a valid state from another source (e.g. direct link, dashboard link, ...).

Story points can be negative, and the bound for the positive axis ("Specify a number for the custom field (below 100,000,000,000,000)") doesn't apply to the negative. I did not test, whether it also crashes, if e.g. the related issue is not part of a sprint.

FireFox 95.0.2 (64-bit)

Obviously, not entering ridiculous values fixes the problem. Just having started with jira today, am i misunderstanding something, making a basic mistake, or is this a simple oversight, which i unluckily happened to find right away, and is going to be fixed?

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

You are right about the oversight, Atlassian hasn't limited or validated a simple numeric field that is used for Story points because no one uses it that way.  Negative numbers are useless to estimates, and large numbers defeat the point of using an estimate, so no one does it.  (FWIW, you can enter fractions as well, and it'll work fine, albeit anything more complex than the odd ".5" or, when you simply can't agree on a real value and botch the compromise with a mean average, is useless in an estimate too).

There's also a slight problem with config - you can use any numeric for an estimate, and if you decided to swap to something else, you would need to start imposing validation on that too.

Atlassian hasn't bothered to validate these edge cases.  (If it were me, I wouldn't do much coding for it either, but I would add a quick "abs" when reading an estimate field for the purposes of sprint estimation, so at least the negatives would go away)

Daniel Eads · Answer

Hi there,

Interestingly enough, I was able to get -1e40 onto an issue as well:

But it didn't crash Firefox 95.0.2 on my test.

In order to get a value this large saved on the issue however, you must be using the old issue view, and you must use a negative value as you mentioned. The validator on the old issue view will stop you from saving positive values larger than 1e14.

However, using the new issue view (the only view possible on the backlog, and the default for viewing issues normally), the validator will stop you from creating negative story point values.

As the new issue view is rolling out out all sites and is now the default for most users , I think we can say "it has been fixed".

Cheers,
Daniel