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Sum up story points in epic when removing a story

Jan Rosar

Hi,

I built an automation to sum up story points in an epic based on this question and the answer from Carlos Treminio.

Sum up Story points to epic

As discussed there, this automation doesn't work, when a story gets added or removed to/from an epic. The solution posted by Guy Anela doesn't work for me, because the mentioned smart value {{changelog.Epic Link}} gives nothing back, which I tested by logging it.

So I tried the following solution for adding a story to an epic, this works great:

When adding a parent issue to a child issue, my idea is, to populate a custom field (customfield_10271) with the issue key of the parent issue, which I can use for the next automation, when I remove the parent issue from a child issue.

But I'm not quite there yet. When this automation runs, the story points of the epic is always 0, I don't understand, why.

The automation looks like this:

In the log of the smartvalue {{issue.key}} I get the correct issue key of the parent issue, which was removed. In the last step I try to build the sum with {{lookupIssues.Story Points.sum}}, which always is 0.

Thanks to everyone, who read my question up to this point and I'm happy about every input from the community.

Best regards

Jan

Accepted answers

All comments

Marc -Devoteam-

Hi @Jan Rosar

Welcome to the community.

See the following automation rule, of a simple story point sum up in the Epic.

In the lookup action change this to "Parent" = {{issue.key}}

Screenshot 2025-03-07 at 10.48.42.png

You could change the trigger to value change for parent, or use both fields.

Pasam Venkateshwarrao

Hi @Jan Rosar

Try this Automation rule

Screenshot 2025-03-07 at 3.23.43 PM.png

It will work for sure i tried this it works for me

Jan Rosar

Hi @Marc -Devoteam-

thank you for your response.

I'm afraid, your solution doesn't help with my problem, because, I don't change the value of the story points, but remove the child issue from the epic. So this automation wouldn't run in this case.

Best regards

Jan

Marc -Devoteam-

Hi @Jan Rosar

As I mentioned, in the text, change the trigger to look at the field parent.

Then the automation looks if the parent field is changed, it will continue if the issue is not and Epic, then it will update the Story Points on the Epic.

Adjust the lookup query to "Parent" = {{issue.key}}

Jan Rosar

Hi @Marc -Devoteam-

sorry, when I make your adjustments, it only works for adding a story to an epic. When I remove it, so the field "Parent" is empty, nothing happens.

And I think, this is correct, because in your automation the branch looks for the parent of the issue. But I removed the parent, so the branch doesn't run, because the trigger issue doesn't meet the condition of the branch.

Jan Rosar

Hi @Pasam Venkateshwarrao

thank you for your response. Your solution doesn't work for me, because you are checking, whether the story points on an epic are changed. I don't change the story points, but remove a child issue from an epic.

Best regards

Jan

Bill Sheboy

Hi @Jan Rosar

Please note well: parent / child data sum scenarios (e.g., to sum the child Story Points to the Epic Parent) span many possible cases. This is one of the reason there are marketplace apps to perform this type of field rollup / sync.

Some of the cases can be combined into rules with one trigger and conditional logic while others require their own rules with different triggers. Deciding which cases to handle will impact which rules to build.

A sampling of the cases around your scenario are:

When a Story is created with a parent Epic set, update the parent's field
When an existing Story with a parent Epic changes its Story Points, update the parent's field
When a Story with a parent Epic is deleted from Jira, update the parent's field
When a Story changes the parent Epic, update both the previous and current parents' fields
When a person alters the Story Points in an Epic, recalculate the total from the child Stories
For all of the above #1-5, decide if an automation rule performs the initiating event, should the rule run (by enabling the Allow Rule Trigger option). This scenario could create runaway rule looping, halting all rule executions.
When there is an Atlassian automation outage, there is no documentation of which rule events will eventually cause the rules to run and "catch up". And so it helps to build a Scheduled Trigger rule that can iterate the Epics to catch them up on the child Story sums. This rule may be left disabled until there is an outage, enabled and run until caught up, and then disabled again.
When some updates occur in rapid succession (e.g., issue import) there can be update "racetrack errors" in automation rules. While there are mitigations for these there are no guaranteed solutions. One workaround is after running an import, use the Scheduled Trigger rule described in #7 to ensure the values are correct.

Kind regards,
Bill

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