As part of an ongoing series, Atlassian University offered this free webinar to strengthen your Atlassian product skills and learn directly from Atlassian experts. In this webinar, we learned about how estimation and scope change impacts reporting in Jira Scrum boards.
Together we:
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Considered best practices for successful estimation
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Discovered how scope changes affect reporting
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Dived deep into the relevant board settings
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Answered your questions, live!
Speaking of those questions...
Yesterday's top 3 burning questions—and Atlassian's answers
@Ree Kent made sure you got the answers you needed most!
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Can scrum teams estimate bugs using story points?
Atlassian Answer: The decision to add points to non-story issue types such as bugs, tasks and spikes can be controversial. Much of the decision is dependent on what points are used to measure. For example, some teams may use points to measure value delivered. In that case, it would be a best practice to only add points to stories. However, if the need is to measure how much effort the team commits to in any given sprint, then using points on other issue types could be acceptable.
What points represent is something the team, and perhaps the organization, should agree on. Jira Software will allow users to estimate any standard issue type with points and those estimations are reflected on the agile reports.
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What is the advantage of estimating in story points instead of time?
Atlassian Answer: Typically story points are used to measure effort, value and/or risk. The benefit of measuring stories using points is that teams can control how much complex work they include in a sprint and how much change they introduce at the end of a sprint, instead of focusing on how long a solution will take to deliver.
Using Story Points, versus hours, reduces anxiety around accuracy. Sprint estimation becomes more and more reliable with practice. You can use actual hours, but it's not reasonable to assume that all hours of a week are productive. Dates don’t account for the non-project related work that inevitably creeps into our days: emails, meetings, and interviews that a team member may be involved in. Dates have an emotional attachment to them. Relative estimation removes the emotional attachment. Developers have a general sense of how much they can accomplish during a 2-week sprint - allowing for over or underestimating. As a best practice, don't assign time values to story points. Doing this obviates the main reason to use story points in the first place.
This Atlassian article provides a deeper dive on this topic.
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What is the purpose of using both stories and sub-tasks?
A story represents the product owner’s request. This is something that the entire scrum team may work on. Sub-tasks are the smaller pieces of work being assigned to individual team members to deliver a solution for the story.
Using sub-tasks enables the team members to have their own work items for tracking progress. If there is a need to view planned workload, time estimation can be added to sub-tasks to then show all of the assigned issues and estimated time for each user. Time tracking may be needed for reporting and Jira Software supports this approach by allowing the Story Points field to be added to stories, and the Time Tracking fields to be added to sub-tasks.
Keep in mind that adding, removing, estimating, and logging work on sub-tasks will only be reflected on reports if you have the Time Tracking setting set to Remaining Estimate and Time Spent.
What questions do you have for @Ree Kent and @Joanna Thurmann?
Watch the recording and ask them in the comments below!
This webinar is intended for scrum teams, power users and project administrators, and those preparing for a Jira certification exam. Topics will be relevant to Jira Cloud, Data Center, and Server.
