Should we use story points for sub-tasks in Portfolio?

[Roger Butler]

This question is in reference to Atlassian Documentation: Creating and deleting work items

In Portfolio, why does Scope allow you to enter story points for sub-tasks (and sum them to the parent Story) but then issue a warning on commit about being unable to commit story points? Should we enter story points for sub-tasks?

[Martin Suntinger · Accepted solution]

Hi Roger, this really depends on your estimation process. Agile out of the box does suggest NOT to estimate story points on sub-task level, but keep them on the story level only. The views and reports on agile boards are currently optimized for that. However, we see some teams have a need to estimate more fine-grained nevertheless, thus this is a popular feature request for boards to support better sum-up of subtask story points. 

As it is today: If you don't have an urgent need to estimate sub-tasks in points, I'd recommend not to do it. If you have a need, you can actually add the story point field to the sub-task issue type. In this case, the commit from Portfolio to JIRA will also succeed. The limitation however is that the agile board does not deal explicitly with the aggregation, so your velocity reports won't consider those story points from the subtasks. 

[Jerry Garcia Stackpoole]

Hi Martin,

How we can add the story point field to the sub-task issue type? The option does not show up on our instance.