What does unestimated issues in the Advanced Roadmaps 'Progress by story points' depict?

[NAYANA]

The 'Unestimated issues' is not intuitive. Even though all the issues under an EPic are estimated, the progress by story points bar shows 119 points as unestimated issues. Looking for clarification on what does that piece of information show and how is it calculated?

Thanks,

Nayana Geddam

[Dave · Accepted solution]

Hi @NAYANA,

Apologies for the very late response to this... is it possible that the count of unestimated issues is included sub-tasks that are not displayed due to the hierarchy range? Does the number of unestimated issues shown match the number of children of the epic?

Regards,

Dave 

[NAYANA]

Yes Dave, I think that is what is happening. The system is counting all child issues including sub-tasks and the parent itself. I and 100s of other users in my organization expected to see the immediate children count only.

I wish there was a user guide or help text to say the same.

I discovered it the hard way.

Thanks for getting back anyway!

[Dave]

Thanks for confirming @NAYANA - sorry about the confusion over this. I'll pass this feedback onto our documentation team to see if they can make any improvements.

[NAYANA]

Thanks Dave. Appreciate it.

[Johnny Hermann]

It counts the whole hierarchy.  Everything needs an estimate to avoid the alert about "Unestimated issues" - in that case, assign zero - a situation demonstrating that zero is not nothing! :-)

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @NAYANA 

First thing, have you seen this documentation on the progress tracking for Advanced Roadmaps?  This explains how the estimation works.

https://confluence.atlassian.com/advancedroadmapscloud/tracking-progress-and-status-998651480.html

If so, please check the items the documentation notes about the methods used for estimation, in particular whether the items in the epic are shown on multiple boards when those boards have different estimation methods.

And, your screen image indicates JIRA finds unestimated items, so please confirm the items are indeed estimated using your chosen estimation method, which appears to be story points.

Thanks, and best regards,

Bill

[Mike Lemmon]

Hi There:

I'm experiencing the same issue, where the summary shows a 1 for  "Unestimated Issues", in the rolled up summary for an Epic, where when I check out all of the User Stories under the Epic each of them have an Estimate, and are reflected properly in the total for "Estimated issues" and the "Remaining" Story Points count....

I have followed the above linked and as far as I can tell .. everything is setup correctly.

Any thoughts what this is still reflecting there are Unestimated issues?

[Jay Lankford]

I see the same issue Mike. All stories under an Epic are estimated but I still see 1 Unestimated Issue showing up in Advanced Roadmaps.

I believe it is counting the Epic itself as unestimated. If I enable story points for the Epic issue type and add a value to that field for the epic, then it no longer shows 1 Unestimated Issue. My Estimated Issue count is now inflated by 1, but at least everything shows up as estimated.

I don't know why it would include the Epic, and it is definitely problematic for our use of this feature, but, at least from what I can tell, that is what it appears to be doing.

Can't think how this would cause the issue the original poster is seeing though.

[Dave]

Hi @Jay Lankford,

The the progress fields (both issue count and estimate) are based on the current issue and all descendant issues. Because the estimate value of the field is included in the progress itself it might be considered strange if we didn't include it in the count of potentially unestimated issues.

The way that we imagine that people might want to use the estimate on an epic is to give it an initial size prior to it being broken down into stories. Typically I would expect an epic to only have an estimate if it's an indication that it is not fully broken down yet but I'm aware that not everyone works that way. But by giving the epic an estimate it allows you to plan capacity for your team into the future based on the epic estimate without needing to break it down into stories.

I do appreciate that this isn't necessarily intuitive, nor is it the way that everyone will want to work.

Regards,

Dave 

[Jay Lankford]

Thanks Dave. This makes some sense, but causes issues because it also includes the points in the Completed/Remaining totals.

For instance, the epic below has 5 stories, all estimated for a total of 14 points. I've updated Story Points on the Epic to have 14 points so that it accurately shows 0 Unestimated Issues, but then it also adds those 14 points to the Remaining total. This means the percent remaining is now inflated as the points are double counted. The epic should show 9 points (~64%) complete and only 5 (~36%) remaining, but instead the percentages are way off.

Is there a way around this? It seems as if either my Estimated/Unestimated is inflated or the Completed/Remaining is inaccurate.

[Dave]

Thanks for sharing that screenshot @Jay Lankford - so rather than setting the epic estimate as 14 points what happens if you set the estimate as 0 (I'm assuming it was blank before?)

The idea of giving an epic an estimate would not be to manually calculate the sum of the points yourself, but to indicate that there is still work to do that is not accounted for by stories (i.e. you still need to create some stories).

However, if that isn't working then we might need to make a fix here!

Regards,

Dave

[Jay Lankford]

Thanks for the response, it makes a little more sense now. Setting it to zero works. Given your explanation, I would say it is functioning as expected.

We typically don't leave work at the epic level and really push our teams to fully define the work in stories. I'm considering making the default value for Story Points be 0 for Epics to avoid some confusion, especially since Story Points is actually a hidden field for us at the Epic level.

I imagine some will still ask why the Estimated/Unestimated numbers don't match the number of stories, but we can cover that in our documentation.

Thanks again for the help. I think we have the info we need to make this work.

[Dave]

Thanks for confirming @Jay Lankford. I completely agree that this is not completely obvious and might not be the way that everyone works. It's very valuable feedback and we do appreciate it!