Are story points accepted for Tasks

[Rajesh Jaggumantri]

I am very much confused on Story point estimates for a Task in Jira. Unllike few other tools where the story points are used for estimating only for User Story, I heard Jira allows to estimate a Task in Story Points. Could anyone suggest why Tasks are setimated in story points. Do we have a standard process that can be followed

[Walter Buggenhout · Accepted solution]

Hi @Rajesh Jaggumantri,

There is a technical side to this and a process side. Technically, it is perfectly possible to allow for tasks to be estimated in story points. It is just a matter of making sure the story point field is available on the screens you use for tasks in Jira.

The process part is something else. In general I would say it is best practice to restrict story point estimations to stories only. They should normally be the things your team delivers as value to the product / project you are building and - as such - the work you are estimating in points. Tasks can be used for any type of supporting activities you need to do aside of that: having meetings, running experiments, ...

In our company, we estimate stories in story points and tasks in time. On top of that, we also log work (hours) on all types of tasks. Thus, we can calculate what we call effort - the time needed to build 1 story point. That metric is then used to add original estimates to stories, based on the story point estimate. Adding that translation makes it possible to track burndown based on remaining estimate, both for stories and other tasks.

But - having said that - I know plenty of organisations that use story point estimates on tasks as well. That is a tradeoff you should make as a team or - ideally - across teams within your organisation. 

[Scott Rowell]

I love this idea "In our company, we estimate stories in story points and tasks in time."

But I simply don't see how to do it from the Jira interface.  How does Jira let you set up time estimates for tasks, but story points for stories ?

[G subramanyam · Accepted solution]

Hi @Rajesh Jaggumantri welcome to the Atlassian community.

Jira basically allows to input story points at "Story level". However, you can configure the story points at "task" level. Please go through this link: https://support.atlassian.com/jira-software-cloud/docs/configure-estimation-and-tracking/

The story points estimation on tasks might be the choice of few organizations or projects. In Agile methodology, estimations at story level are advisable and a Sprint is not reviewed at subtasks level but by the story completion level.

Coming to your query, you should have the Project admin AND OR board admin to configure your Jira board and settings.

If my post address your query, kindly click "accept answer" for the benefit of new members.

[jewel kyeh]

The name story points suggests that they are only assigned to user stories but I believe not every ticket in jira can be created as a user story. There are times when you need to create some tasks in the form of updating an API or making some minor changes. These are changes that do not tell a user story or are not impacting anything from the user point of view so therefore tasks are created instead of user stories. In those scenarios, we still go ahead to give them story points since it is an estimation of the effort involved and they add up to the overall velocity of the team. I dont know how other teams are able to combine user stories and time but this is how I have been doing it with my team and they have worked for me so far. I hope this helps.

[Robert Crook]

For Tasks, there is no option to add Story Points to it.