Question about estimation units and story points

Brian Burki January 11, 2018

Hello!

We're considering implementing the recommendations in this Atlassian article:

"Configuring Estimation and Tracking"

https://confluence.atlassian.com/agile/jira-agile-user-s-guide/configuring-a-board/configuring-estimation-and-tracking

Specifically the part about the use of story points as the estimation value when estimating product enhancements, new features, platform improvements, etc, the details of which are currently unknown. In other words, stuff that is in the backlog, but has not been broken down into understandable and manageable chunks of work.

The article indicates that using story points for estimation is useful for estimating these poorly-understood future projects, which in our case are usually either Epics or Stories.

So if we're following the process outlined in the article I assume we'd throw a story point on an Epic or Story that's going to be worked on in the future. But what happens when those Epics/Stories start getting refined and we create a bunch of Stories/Task under the Epics and Sub-Tasks under the Stories? Do we add story points to those too? Epics will never get added to a sprint so how do those story points get tracked to calculate velocity? Similarly with Stories, what if the Story ends up getting broken up into Tasks (not Sub-Tasks), do we then add story points to those and just be careful to make sure all the story points given to the related Task add up to the value given to the original Story?

Sorry about the convoluted question. Hopefully it makes some sense.

Thanks!

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