nav[aria-label="Primary Navigation"] { padding: 0; & ul { list-style: none; width: 100%; display: flex; flex-direction: row; justify-content: start; align-items: start; gap: 30px; padding: 0; & li { margin: 0; } & ul li { list-style: none; } } }

How to sum up the story points for leadership reporting and update on dashboard using Story points

Tanvi Sharma

We work with native JIRA in which ROVO, Analytics are disabled (except for JIRA Automation). And we need to publish a report for leadership to showcase the work done vs the remaining/planned work (w.r.t. Sprints & Product Backlog).

In JIRA dashboard, none of the widgets allow using "Story Points" as an input parameter (even though the Story Point is configured as numeric field).

So, rather than integrating JIRA with third party tools (like Power BI etc., which incur cost), please suggest if there is a way to do these calculations within JIRA?

Accepted answers

All comments

Nikola Perisic

Hi @Tanvi Sharma

You would need an automation rule here:

Trigger: Field change for Story Points
Condition: Issue type equals Sub-tasks
Action: Lookup issues with query parent = {{issue.parent.key}}
Action: Edit issue - parent, field - story points, value - {{lookupIssues.Story Points.sum}}

Tanvi Sharma

Thanks for the inputs.

Can you please explain the last Action - how to add all these details?

As of now, this is what I have created:

John Funk

Hi Tanvi,

See if this article helps you:

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-articles/How-Can-I-Sum-Up-Multiple-Issues-into-a-Parent-Number-Field/ba-p/2882712

Danut M _StonikByte_

Hi @Tanvi Sharma,

Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

Maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t quite see how summing up the story points from sub-tasks into the parent story would address your need to build effective reports for leadership.

To create a meaningful leadership dashboard, you typically need dedicated gadgets that track different aspects of project performance, such as sprint and release progress, epic progress, burndown trends, velocity, and other key metrics. These insights generally can’t be achieved simply by aggregating story points.

Jira’s built-in gadgets are somewhat limited in this area. However, Jira native gadgets like Sprint Health or Sprint Burndown are already based on the total story points within a sprint, making them a good starting point for building more useful reporting and dashboards.

However, to build an effective reporting dashboard for your leadership team, you’ll likely need additional gadgets, which you can find by exploring apps (plugins) available on the Atlassian Marketplace.

If you'd like to try such a solution, our Great Gadgets app provides everything needed for this use case.

Your reporting need for "the work done vs the remaining/planned work (w.r.t. Sprints & Product Backlog)" can be measured by using its gadgets Sprint Burndown Burnup Chart (as for sprint level) and Release Burndown Burnup Chart (at release, backlog level).

Very helpful for tracking "the work done vs the remaining/planned work" along the sprints is the Team Velocity gadget.

If you prefer a more custom way to calculate sum of story points, these gadgets are the solution:

Advanced Issue Filter Formula gadget - it allows applying from simple (SUM, COUNT, AVG) to complex math formulas to issue fields (such as story points) from multple filters.

Pivot Table & Pivot Chart - it allows displaying multi-dimensional stats based on sum of a field (such as Story Points) just like pivot tables in Excel.

These are the type of charts you need for an effective leadership dashboard, and I'm afraid they cannot be generated just by calculating the sum of story points via automation...

Danut.

Lukas Maczejka _Appfire_

Hi @Tanvi Sharma and welcome to the community!

As mentioned by others already, there are some (limited) options you can explore using existing gadgets (e.g. Sprint Health), or through complex automation rules.

If you're open to a solution from the Atlassian Marketplace, the app my team works on — JXL for Jira — is built exactly for this kind of aggregated reporting.

JXL is a spreadsheet-style view for Jira issues. Its sum-ups feature aggregates any numeric field — including Story Points — across hierarchy levels and groupings. For your use case you could, for example:

Group issues by Sprint and see total/done/remaining story points per sprint at a glance
Group by Epic to show progress across the backlog
Combine both to get a two-level breakdown in one sheet

The sheet can also be added as a gadget on any Jira dashboard, so your leadership view stays in Jira.

Disclosure: I work for the team that builds JXL.

Cheers,

Lukas

Rahul_RVS

Hi @Tanvi Sharma

Welcome to the community !!

If you are looking to get an overview of your sprint progress and are willing to try out a mktplace app, take a look at

Agile Velocity & Sprint Status Gadgets

The Sprint Status gadget gives a complete summary of your sprint progress with multiple widgets.

The app comes with few other dashboard gadgets to track team member's / team's velocity / productivity based on story points / time spent / issue count in a sprint and also track sprint status with multiple parameters.

Disclaimer : I am part of the team which developed this app

Resource Velocity Chart.png

Sprint Status1.png

Marlene Kegel - codefortynine

Welcome to the community, @Tanvi Sharma.

I’m Marlene, part of the team behind Quick Filters for Jira Dashboards.

Our app also supports aggregating Story Points and other Jira number fields within the following gadgets:

Quick Work Item Statistics
Quick Two Dimensional Filter Statistics
Quick Pie Chart / Quick Workload Pie Chart
Quick Bar Chart
Quick Created vs. Resolved Chart
Quick Time Series (Advanced)

On top of that you can dynamically filter all gadgets on your dashboard using a Quick Controller gadget.

quick-filters-jira-dashboards_quick-controller_project.png

Alexey Pavlenko _App Developer_

Hi @Tanvi Sharma ,

Reliably and without any 3rd party apps, you will need to use Jira's REST API and build your own solution. That's the only way, unfortunately.

If you consider 3rd party apps, you can try the app I developed - Multi-team Scrum Metrics & Retrospectives.

With it, you can not only track

the work done vs the remaining/planned work (Completed Scope % out of Final Scope),

but also:

Data across sprints, months, quarters, half-years or years.
Several teams (including those ones sharing the same project) at once.
Velocity, capacity, allocation, completed story points (completed scope), planned (initial, final scopes), added and removed scopes, as well as other metrics. You can even create your own custom metrics using JQL.
Trends and average metrics across periods.
Conduct Quantifiable retrospectives.
And many more.

3 boards/teams in the same view, 1 period selected for analysis:

3 boards/teams in the same view, all periods are clicked for average metrics and dynamics:

Best regards,
Alexey

Max Mykhailenko

Hi Tanvi,

I would reframe the question slightly. A single sum of Story Points is usually not enough for leadership reporting, because it hides the two things leadership usually needs to understand:

did the team execute at the expected pace?
did the scope change after the plan was made?

For example, if you planned 100 points and now show 70 done / 30 remaining, that can look fine. But it means something very different if the original scope was 80 and 20 points were added later, or if several issues were re-estimated during the sprint/release.

So I would avoid making "sum of Story Points" the main leadership number. A better report usually separates:

Planned scope at the start of the period.
Scope added or removed during the period.
Re-estimates / scope growth on existing issues.
Completed scope.
Remaining scope.
Current execution pace / velocity.

Native Jira can help with parts of this through Sprint reports, burndown/burnup, filters, and Automation, but the difficult part is preserving the history of what changed and when. If you need this fully inside Jira without Analytics, you may need an Automation rule that snapshots values at the start/end of each period, or a Marketplace app that already keeps those comparisons.

Disclosure: I am building Focus Flow, a Jira Marketplace app focused on epic execution review. It is not a generic Story Point dashboard, but this is one of the reasons we avoid treating one aggregate number as the whole story. In weekly review, we try to show planned dates, worklog evidence, scope/estimate changes, and execution pace together, so the discussion becomes "why did the plan change?" rather than only "what is the current total?"

For your leadership report, I would start with this question:

"Do we need a total Story Point number, or do we need to explain how planned work changed, how fast work is being completed, and what scope was added or re-estimated?"

That framing will usually lead to a more useful dashboard than a single summed Story Point field.

Welcome!

It looks like you're new here. Sign in or register to get started.

Quick Links

Find more posts tagged with

jira

cloud

jira-software

jira-cloud