Summing up story points of linked issues from another board

Question

I've encountered a roadblock in one of my automation workflows. Current setup of our board is we have a dev board (Board A) which contains all stories/tasks/sub-tasks/bugs for devs to work on and we link it to our product board (Board B)  so we can track which ones belong to a certain sprint.

Right now I am able to sum up story points on Board A natively, regardless if that's a parent or child. What I want to capture is to be able to roll-up whatever these sums are to the linked product ticket found in Board B. As an example:

Board A has:

Task 1 = 2 story points

Task 2 = 3 story points

Task 3 = 2 story points

Board B has:

Product Ticket 1 (Story) which links Task 1 and 2 from Board A.

Ideal Result: Product Ticket 1's story points should automatically be filled up as 5.

Trudy P Claspill · Answer

If you are using multiple link relationships and if the link relationships are not applied consistently (i.e. it is always the Board/Project A issues that "requires" the other project issue), then attempting to construct rules that address all the possible combinations becomes exponentially more difficult.

If you are usually using the "requires" relationship, you could construct a rule based on that relationship. It might cover most cases, but it won't cover rolling up the data if some other relationship was used to link issues.

"requires" is not a link type that is created by default by Jira, so it must have been added by your Jira Admins.

Does that link type have different descriptions for the Inward and Outward Descriptions?

Is it used consistently in that the issue in Project A relates to the other issues in the other projects in the same way?

Would you want to roll up all the story points for all issues linked in this way, or do you use that same link type between issues where you don't want the roll up to occur?

An overview of the rule to construct would be

TRIGGER: issue linked

ACTION: Lookup Issues

- using a JQL that retrieves all the appropriately linked issues

ACTION: Edit Issue

- setting the appropriate issue field in the Project A issue to the smart value {{lookupIssues.<your story point field name>.sum}}

The flow depends on which issue is the trigger. The simplified version above is based on the issue in Project A being the trigger (Issue A shows in its linked issues list the Inward Description of the link relationship to issues in the other projects).

Stefi Abellana · Answer

HI @Trudy P Claspill here are my answers:

* They reference issues in other projects. Right now there are 8-9 project boards that reference to the dev board (Board A)
* Our rule of thumb is we usually use "requires" but I've seen older stories having other link relationships.

Trudy P Claspill · Answer

Hello @Stefi Abellana

There is a Link Created trigger that will detect when an issue link is added, but it is more complicated to use. You have to understand which issue in the linkage is considered the "source" issue and which is considered the "destination" issue to figure out the next steps.

Which issue is the source and which is the destination is based on which side of the link relationship each issue gets. The source issue gets the Outward Description, and the destination issue gets the Inward Description for the link.

As noted in the trigger description, the source issue is the one that fires the trigger, regardless of which Board the issue is displayed in.

Rules are set to run against Projects, not Boards. So the triggering of the rule will depend on whether it is set to run against the Projects that contain the issues for these boards, and which issue gets the Outward Description of the link. Your rule would have to accurately determine which issue in the pair gets the story point roll up. If you always use the same type of link and the link goes the same direction (based on the Projects of the issues, not the boards), that would be less complicated than the use of multiple types of links with different directions. If the issues in the two boards are also in different projects (versus the same project) that can help make the rule construction easier. If the link relationship used is "relates" that makes things harder because the Inward and Outward descriptions are identical.

So, the questions to ask are:

1. Are these two boards referencing issues in different projects or do they reference issues in the same project(s)?

2. What link relationships are used?

3. Are the link relationships applied in a consistent direction? Example: the issues in Board B always are set to "block" the issues in Board A.