How to calculate & register efforts of various teams along one workflow?

Question

We deliberately built a product development workflow whcih includes stages and steps performed by various teams: analysts, developers, and QA. I am looking for some standard way to register and generate reports on the efforts of various teams across one workflow in story points.

Suppose analysts estimate their work in X, then the tasks move to developers, and they estimate their work in Y story points. Is there a way to register both numbers and have a report on them? Same with time spent on tasks.

Ste Wright · Answer

Hi @Anastasia Ksenofontova

Can I confirm...

* The end-to-end Workflow is applied to each Issue (Task, Story, etc)
* Multiple teams will work on each Issue
* These teams are not cross-functional - i.e there's not a "team" including a developer, an analyst and a QA - those are three separate teams

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If these are multiple teams...

Whilst technically possible - probably using separate fields per team, and a SUM field (which totals the Story Points into a singular value) - I would recommend considering if this is the most optimum approach.

I would take into account:

* Are these Issues too large? Having multiple teams estimate their involvement at a team-level (not an individual-level) could be arduous from a backlog refinement / planning perspective.
* Is it possible to provide a rough estimate in this manner? Story points are an estimate of the effort to fully complete a piece of work - but none of these teams will be able to provide this individually.
* Will the teams be able to normalise their story points, given they perform different types of work? This could result in unexplainable variances between teams.
* ...etc

^ So whilst technically possible, I would recommend considering if it's the best solution from a ways of working perspective - or, if it is worth revisiting your data model, how you break down the work, and how it is tracked/delivered.

Ste

Fabian Lim · Answer

Hi @Anastasia Ksenofontova

Welcome to the community!

If you need to track the efforts per team who touches the ticket, one option would be to create separate story points per team with new custom fields for estimates vs actuals.

For example you if you have Team A and Team B, each would have an estimate customfield and then actual custom fields.  You can then use jira automation to sum up the story points for each custom field to the systems' estimated story points and story points.

The other option would be to have sub-tasks on each story where each team would estimate their efforts and actual.  Then use jira automation again to pick up the totals.

Regards