Portfolio - do Story Points adjust with team size?

Question

I imported my Stories from JIRA and asked Portfolio to keep Story Points in Sync.

Next thing I know I'm seeing fractional Story Points and a history that I changed the Points. It looks like Portfolio re-calculated the points based on the automated assignments it had made.

I use Story Points as a fixed effort value. I expect estimated velocity to be based on the velocity of the entire team. If Story Points are being changed because Portfolio thinks I can assign multiple team members to a Story then my method doesn't work.

Bill Rinko-Gay · Answer

With the help of the support team I found it.

We use sub-tasks of our Stories to track backlog grooming work. As those sub-tasks were completed the Story Points remaining were being reduced as a fraction of the entered sub-tasks.

In Plan->Configure->Progress there's a check box for compute story progress using sub-tasks. When I cleared that check box the issue resolved itself.

Thanks for your help, Martin.

Bill Rinko-Gay · Answer

I'm not sure whether it's happening when I recalculate or when I re-baseline. At least it's no longer changing JIRA since I changed the sync behavior, but it will be a pain if I have to manually keep the points in sync.

I will reach out to support and let you know what I find.

Martin Suntinger · Answer

Hey Bill, This doesn't look right - Portfolio should not recalculate any story point estimates. The only thing that potentially changes over time (but also not automatically), is the team's velocity representing how much the team can get through. I'd suggest to reach out to support (support.atlassian.com) to investigate the particular case. Alternatively, you could check out the new live plans (still in labs mode), which have a much more seamless integration with JIRA and agile boards, see the release notes of 1.12 and the docs linked from there as a starting point: https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRAPortfolio/Portfolio+for+JIRA+1.12+Release+Notes .