Sum of undone subtasks story points

Question

Hi,

Some days ago I have created an automation to sum in the task the story points of the subtasks with this smart values :

Everything works fin but the burndown chart.

In fact, moving a sub task to the done status does not impact the remaining story points of the sprint as it seems to count only the SP of the task itself.

So I am trying to sum only the SP of subtasks wich are not in done status...
But dont know how to do it.

Any help would be great :)

Best regards

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

It's not an opinion, it's an explanation of why your automation is not working, and what you need to do to fix it.

There are two answers to "how to do the calculation excluding the completed subtasks", both given already.

1) Stop putting sprint estimates on sub-tasks

2) Change the automation to calculate your issue-level sprint estimate from a different field, one that is not the sprint estimate

Juan Jimenez_x0rt7j · Answer

Thank you,

Your opinion is very interesting.

But you are not answering the fundamental question which is "how to do the calculation excluding the completed subtasks"

I have created the two fields and configured the context as you said.
But I don't know what to put in the automation to do the calculation.

Best regards,

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

The burndown is actually working fine, the problem is in the way you are putting estimates in the wrong place.

Sub-tasks are not sprint items, they are pieces of items that are.  Because they're not sprint items, you don't put sprint estimates on them.

Burndown only looks at estimates on sprint items.

So the simple answer is "don't do this automation, it's wrong"

Now, there's nothing wrong with estimating subtasks and accumulating them, it's just that because they are not sprint items, they don't have sprint estimates.

If you want to use your sub-task estimates to feed into the sprint estimate, you have to take a different approach.  The two I see used the most are a simple accumulation and a slightly more complex subtraction.

In both of these, you

* Create a field for "issue estimate", available on all issue types 
* Create a (read only) field for "sprint estimate", only on issue types at the issue level (not sub-tasks or epics)
* Set your board to use the "sprint estimate" field for sprint metric
* Calculate the "sprint estimate" on each issue from the "issue estimate" on it and its sub-tasks.  i.e. Sprint estimate = issue estimate on issue + issue estimate on sub-task 1 + issue estimate on sub-task 2 + etc

That's the whole "accumulation" approach, but a lot of people prefer the subtraction approach, where you do the accumulation, but also subtract the sub-task estimate from the story estimate as they are added or updated (for example, if you create a story and estimate it as 8 SP, then create a sub-task estimated at 3 SP, you take 3 SP off the stories estimate.  This has a huge advantage in that adding or amending sub-tasks preserves the original story estimate so that sub-tasks don't cause apparent scope change, but does demand that you put in proper estimates on the stories before you start a sprint (which you should be doing anyway)