How to track story points completed in Jira Agile?

Question

My team completes about 18 story points each sprint. If we take an 8 point story, our burndown gets really difficult to track. So if a story is halfway done, I want to know that.

Scrum shows that time estimates and tracking are crap. People are terrible about guessing them, and terrible about tracking them (do I count the twenty minutes I thought about it in shower?).

So story points is  how we track progress.

I'm willing to do things, like create sub-tasks, etc. But JIRA doesn't really associate story and sub-task story points, so I'm not sure that helps.

What is the easiest way of tracking the story points completed for larger stories?

Geert_Graat · Answer

Hi,

The easiest way is to create smaller stories. That might sound stupid, but you will be surprised at how much you can leave out of a story and still have something that has business value. Then start with that and improve it from there.

Still, sometimes you simply have a big task that cannot be split up. If you want to have feedback on the progress of such tasks, I find that working with time estimates and tracking works rather well. JIRA Agile specifically has the option to enable time tracking next to using story points as estimation statistic. We use this to plan a sprint (based on the story points). After that, we create subtasks for the stories and provide time estimates for these subtasks. These subtasks are small, in the sense that they never take longer than one day. During the sprint everybody tracks their work and the burndown shows the progress based on the remaining estimate.

Regards,

Geert