Assigning Points to multiple assignees, totaling at the top level.

Question

I would like to create a story and be able to bake out the level of effort across multiple assignees, rolling up to one Story and its TOTAL Story points. Is this possible in Jira, or do I need to also create Tasks that would total the Parent level Points in estimation? Thanks for any wisdom here.

Trudy P Claspill · Answer

Hello Chris.

Where you put the story points depends on the structure you use.

Just for clarity, let's review the built in issue hierarchy.

The built in hierarchy is:

Epic
|-- general/standard issue types; Story, Task, Bug, etc.
    |-- Subtasks

Epics and Subtasks are handled differently in Jira.

(If you have a Premium plan you can extend the hierarchy upwards above Epics.)

I have offered two suggestions:

1. Use a Story with Subtasks for the individual contributors. In this case Story Points are assigned only to the Story. If you assign Story Points to the Subtasks that can have unexpected consequences on reports. You can assign time values to Original Estimate on the Subtasks if you want to have more granular tracking of the work effort per individual.

2. Use an Epic with Stories (and/or Tasks) for the individual contributors. In this case Story Points could be assigned to each Story/Task for the effort estimate of that work.

There are several other factors that might be relevant to the decision.

Are you working in a Scrum or Kanban model? If Scrum, is the scope of work in your stories (with multiple contributors) such that all the work can be completed within the time frame of your Sprints?

What type of reporting are you going to need to produce? Are the standard reports available with the Scrum and Kanban models adequate?

Are you working with a Company Managed or a Team Managed project? It will say at the bottom of the navigation pane on the left.

Are you working with a Software, Service, or Business project? That will be shown in the navigation pane on the left at the top below the project name.

Are you an end user of Jira or an administrator of Jira?

Do you have experience with other work tracking tools, like Microsoft Azure DevOps, that impacts your definitions of the terminology for issue types such as user story, task, subtask, epic, and feature?

Chris Daniels_i9kyhj · Answer

Thank you Trudy. So, would you assign any story points to the parent assuming the tasks are linked to the parent and have their own estimation? My question here is are we doubling the Story Points by displaying them in the Parent and a break out at the Task level? I don't want this to cloud the individual Velocity in a Sprint. The use of the "Project Teams" field is clearly just an awareness level field in a Story and has no other real estimation value.

Trudy P Claspill · Answer

Hello @Chris Daniels

Welcome to the community.

In my scrum experience when multiple people need to contribute to completion of a story, then during story grooming they all contribute to deciding the overall story point value for the story, considering all their contributions. For documenting the specific contributions of each person we created Subtasks under the story.

Keep in mind that Story Points are a gross estimation of the effort to complete a Story. You use them to help plan your capacity. If you need to keep detailed estimations per task needed to complete a story, I recommend the use of Subtasks with Original Estimates of the time needed to do the work, and optionally add Time Tracking if you want to see how well you are doing estimating the tasks.

With Subtasks, all Subtasks need to be completed in order for the parent Story to be considered complete. If that model doesn't align with your process, then you may want to consider instead creating separate Stories for each contributor and create links between them, or assigning them to an Epic that represents the total scope of the effort for the deliverable.