What are the units for the Original Estimate field when importing from a CSV file?

Kevin T Swan September 1, 2016

This question is in reference to Atlassian Documentation: Navigating to the Import Wizard

The online Help file says it should be in seconds but when JIRA converts the value it divides the value by 3600 which converts it to hours or partial hours. For example I entered 86400 seconds which should be 24 hours but instead it converted it to 24 minutes at least that is what the Original Estimate field in JIRA is telling me.

2 answers

0 votes
Kevin T Swan September 6, 2016

We double checked the CSV file in NotePad prior to attempting the upload and the value was in seconds.

The problem seems to be that during the upload JIRA is not properly converting the seconds to either minutes, hours, days, or weeks.

for example, we uploaded a value of 86400 seconds (24 hours * 60 min/hr * 60 sec/min) which should be 24 hours but instead it converted it to 24 minutes!

Paul Cobley March 25, 2018

Hi Kevin, did you ever get an answer/solution to this? I am having the same problem.

Kevin T Swan March 26, 2018

Yes, at the time of the original issue, while the documentation stated that the import time was in seconds, in fact you had to multiply the seconds value by an additonal factor of 60 and use that value in the import! That was because the Import function was dividing the value by 60 while it was reading the file before recording the value. Obviously a "bug"!

Subsequent to the original issue, my organization updated JIRA to a new version and the "bug" was silently fixed! We are at v7.2.12 right now. Don't remember what version we were on with the origianl issue though.

Now the import treats the value read from the file as seconds and the import works correctly as documented. Of course not knowing that the "bug" was fixed caused an issue when we imported some tasks and found that now the Original Estimate values were too high! So we had to go back and adjust our template to not "overcorrect" for the original bug.

Paul Cobley March 26, 2018

Ok, it looks like the bug is still there in the cloud version. 

Thanks for the reply. I'll use your solution in the mean time

Jacin Ferreira April 22, 2019

So odd.. I have a bug with Server 8.0.4 where the estimates in seconds is not importing correctly.

On version 7.x.x I was able to take hours and X*60*60 and then imported that (as it is in seconds) and it worked correctly.

On 8.0.4 through some trial and error I had to modify to be X*60*60*3, and now it imports correctly.

Has anybody else seen this?

Michael Walter November 21, 2019

Hi Jacin,

I can confirm seeing this for Jira Server V8.4: I need to multiply an hour by (3600 * 60) to get seconds in my imported Jira issues.

That's a pain in the neck, especially as this seems to be a recurring bug. For that (or against that, actually) there is regression testing.

This "phenomenon" forces me to "lie" in my import data!

0 votes
vitaliy zapolskyy
Rising Star
Rising Star
Rising Stars are recognized for providing high-quality answers to other users. Rising Stars receive a certificate of achievement and are on the path to becoming Community Leaders.
September 5, 2016

I guess you probably opened CSV in Excel?

sometimes Excel makes wrong guess. please review your CSV using notepad - it may have proper data, in seconds.

Also worth noting that while importing CSV back to JIRA  it treats 1 day as 8 hours. 

Suggest an answer

Log in or Sign up to answer
TAGS
AUG Leaders

Atlassian Community Events