What comprises "Unestimated Issues" in Advanced Roadmaps and how to customize it?

[Nick Chan]

Hi,

I tried looking for methodology docs without luck on this topic. I'm generally curious about what comprises "Unestimated Issues" in Advanced Roadmaps when you hover over "Progress(Story Points), as well as the extent of customizability.

For example, which issue types are included by default?  (story/tasks/bugs? Epics? Sub-tasks? All the above?) If there are unestimated issues under a resolved epic, do those count? If the issue itself is resolved but unestimated, does that count? How do you customize what counts as "unestimated"?

It seems like a helpful feature, but I'm not comfortable using it in reports until we confirm the logic and extent of its customization. Thanks in advance!

[Dave]

Hi @Nick Chan,

Basically any issue that is a descendant of the issue you're looking at is considered, regardless of type. The idea behind this is that you can gauge the progress of an high-level issue based on the estimates assigned to completed points. The reason why we show the number of unestimated issues is to help users make sure they don't get a false sense of progress.

For example you could have an initiative with 3 epics as children, each with 3 story children. But if only one of those issues was estimated and it was completed the progress would show that the initiative was 100% complete because all estimated work had been finished.

It's not possible to customise what counts as unestimated. Only issues that are excluded from the plan will not be considered - so for example if you are using an issue source like a JQL filter that only looks for certain types of issues then only those issues will be in the plan and only those will be considered. There could be descendant issues that are unestimated, but if they are not in the plan then they won't be counted.

I hope this helps!

Regards,
Dave 

[Chris Melville]

It's good that all descendent issues in the plan are considered, but the implementation is flawed.  If the Estimation statistic is set to Story Points, "unestimated issues" includes sub-tasks which do not have a Story Point field.  The list of descendants should be Qualified descendants only, i.e. those that can be estimated using the selected estimation statistic.

[Dave]

I'm a little confused about this... you can add story point estimates to sub-tasks (both within Advanced Roadmaps and directly on the issue details screen as far as I can tell).

See screenshot for an example, the issue DP-7 is a sub-task of DP-2

[Chris Melville]

It can be configured that way, but typically is not.  In our case the field is neither present on the screen nor in context for the issue type.  Therefore it is not possible for these issues to *ever* be "estimated" using the preferred statistic.  BTW we use Jira server.

[Amanda G]

I agree with Chris' comments about sub-tasks and not pointed/estimated.  We do not have the ability to point/estimate sub-tasks and want those excluded from the "progress (story points)" calculation. 

If this comment is accurate, "Only issues that are excluded from the plan will not be considered - so for example if you are using an issue source like a JQL filter that only looks for certain types of issues then only those issues will be in the plan and only those will be considered. ", then there appears to be an issue. I have a JQL that excludes sub-tasks as we do not include those, yet the sub-tasks are included in the unestimated counts.  The sub-tasks are not visible in the plan itself.