Why my Sprint Burndown chart takes user story time estimation

Question

Hi Team,

I am new to Jira and i have a team managed project. I have created user story and its sub tasks. I have added Original estimate hours in sub tasks and not in user story. Now my team updating logged hours in the sub tasks. My Burndown chart report is taking user story efforts and not from the Original estimate of the sub tasks. My team already logged 110 hours from last one week, but in the y-axis from the below screen its showing 0.8 hours.

Below is the screen shot of the Burndown chart, Please let me know how to resolve the issue.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

Ok, that's good.

But your process of estimation is wrong.  A burndown chart works off the sprint estimates, which you have chosen to do with original estimates.

That's fine, but you are putting sprint estimates on items that are not part of your sprint themselves.  Sub-tasks are not sprint items, they are a fragment of their parent story, and so estimates on them will not be looked at by sprint reports like the burndown chart.

There's nothing wrong with estimating sub-tasks if you want to, you just need to remember that they're not sprint items, and hence their estimates won't be included in sprints, unless you design a strategy for rolling them up to the sprint items of which they are a part, and implement some automation to make it happen.

If you go this way, there is one recommendation I would make - do not just add up estimates from stories to sub-tasks.  A simple adding up heavily constrains your backlog refinement and your agility during the sprint, you probably need something more complex.  And whatever you do, use two fields - one for "estimate the humans enter" and a second for "calculated sprint estimate" on the sprint items.

sreedhar murthy · Answer

Hi Team,

I am using Team Managed project.

I have updated Story point estimate for all my user stories and now my burn down chart looks like,

Trudy P Claspill · Answer

Hello @sreedhar murthy

Welcome to the community.

First, Original Estimates entered for Subtasks do not automatically get summed up and attributed to the parent issue.

Second, for Team Managed projects the burndown report does not utilize information available in Subtasks, as is mentioned at the bottom of this article:

https://support.atlassian.com/jira-software-cloud/docs/view-and-understand-the-team-managed-sprint-burndown-chart/

Third, based on my experimentation the Remaining Work line on the chart does not appear to change as hours are logged, but rather only when the issue is transitioned to done. At that time the Remaining Work is decreased by the value in the Original Estimate for the issue. I haven't yet found any documentation that states this as a fact, it is just based on my experiments with sample data.