How to roll Hours Tracked (worked) from child tasks into Epic

Question

Hello Everyone,

I know this question has come up in one form or another but ill still ask.  I want the most efficient way to sum up all the time spent working on Stories & Bugs that are child issues of an epic, into an Epic level field.  The goal is to look at the epic level field and see how much time has been spent on it.  Does Jira have a native way of doing this, or is there some customization that can be configured or automated to do this?

We utilize the following structure:

* Release* Initiative* Epic* Stories
* Bugs

If you need more information, please let me know.

Thanks!

Trudy P Claspill · Accepted Answer

Hello @Ryan_Smith

Given, as you said, that this question has been asked many times before, and has been answered many times before, have you reviewed the posts on the topic where answers have been provided and accepted?

The only "native" way to handle this is to create an Automation rule to do it. The question becomes which method you want to implement in the rule.

If you want the time to display in the "pretty" format (i.e. weeks, days, hours, minutes), there is no custom field available for displaying durations in that manner. In that case you have two choices for your Automation rule:

1. Have the rule log time against the epic each time that time is logged against the child issues.

2. Sum up the time in the child issues, either periodically or based on a work log related event in the child issues, then do the math in your rule to convert that to an appropriate weeks/days/hours/seconds display and put that value into a text field.

The challenge with the first option is that if a work log is changed or deleted at the child level, or a child issue is moved to another Epic, it becomes much more difficult to make the corresponding change in the Epic.

The challenge with the second option is working out the math to convert the value properly, taking into consideration working days of the week and working hours of the day.