Time Tracking in Greenhopper

[Phil Lancaster]

I am estimating in story points and time tracking in hours. I want the remaining hours field in the user story to be the total of the remaining hours in the sub-tasks. But I cannot enter sub-task remaining hours in Plan mode, only in Work mode. The user story is not available in Work mode until I start the sprint. But if I start the sprint without remaining hours in the user stories, the ideal burn-down chart is not plotted.

It's a Catch-22 situation. The only way I can get the initial burn-down plotted is to put guesswork hours remaining nto the user stories, whereas they should be the sum of the sub-task hours remaining. But I can't enter the sub-tasks hours remaining until I've started the sprint.

Surely I should be able to enter sub-task hours remaining in Plan mode?

Jira 5.2.5 Greenhopper 6.1.2

[Dobroslawa Wierzbicka · Accepted solution]

You cannot edit the Sub-tasks' remaining estimates directly in the Plan mode, but you should be able to edit the field in the Sub-task's Edit Screen (click Actions > Edit in the Sub-tasks section of the Story's detail pane). Would that be a suitable workaround for you?

[Tom Wilhelm]

I can't speak for the original poster, but given the workflow we're talking about, it's an inefficient workaround at best.

My team have basically 2 hours for our Sprint Planning meeting every two weeks and we have to get through a lot of stories... selecting which stories to include, then breaking down with sub-tasks how we'll approach each one. With an average of 30-35 stories, half of which need to be broken down into 2-5 sub-tasks each, I figure there are ~50 or so times we need to enter a sub-task remaining estimate during the 60-75 minutes we have left after agreeing on the sprint contents.

You can see how the inefficiency can multiply quickly when its core to the workflow...

Maybe there's just a better way to organize our workflow that aligns with the software design?

[Tom Wilhelm]

I asked the very same question on the Configurating Estimation and Tracking page and would love to hear an answer on this!