Preserving Original Estimate

Tanner Wortham

I love how the children estimates roll up into the parent, but I see one problem with this. Let me describe:

1. The parent item is created. No original estimate is specified.
2. Two children tasks are created with estimates of 3h and 5h. The parent's estimate is now 3 + 5 = 8h.
3. The parent is now officially considered "planned." the team expects 8h of work is all that's needed to accomplish the work.
4. Work begins on this parent item.
5. Two days later, someone realizes another tasks is necessary, creates this task, and estimates it at 5h. Parent estimate is now 13h.

ohhh noooesss!!! the parent's original estimate should not have been increased to 13h. It should remain at 8h since that's the final estimate before work began. so my question is this ...

how do you "lock" the original estimate at a certain point in the workflow?

Norman Abramovitz

Either sub-tasks rolls up its estimates or it does not. As common as it might be that people want to freeze the original estimate, it also common for people to not freeze the estimate. I would probably copy in a post-function the original esitimate to a custom field when switching into the in progress status.

If the issue enters and leaves the in-progress status and then enters in progess status again, the custom field would be set to the new estimated value.

I believe the JIRA Misc Workflow Extensions plugin provides the copy operation that you need to implement this solution.