Can I track sprint progress with a custom field for Story Points?

[Olivia Medina]

Hi guys, 

I´m having some issues tracking my Sprint progress. My current configuration is as follows:

- A custom field as a Select List (single choice) for my Story Points (1,2,3,5,8,13).

- Selected Story Points as the field to track progress on the sprint. However, my Sprint burndown looks flat, no data visible.

What am I doing wrong? I think the values on my dropdown are probably not considered numeric, but I´m unsure what to do next to fix it.  

I appreciate any help you can provide.

[Trudy Claspill · Accepted solution]

Hello @Olivia Medina 

Welcome to the community.

Story Points is the name of a built-in field. You should generally not create a custom field with the same name as an existing field. That leads to confusion as you don't really know which of those fields you have selected.

In my environment I created a new custom field "New Story Points Selection List", like yours. When I go to the Board Settings > Estimation, that field is not available to select.

Based on that I would say that when you selected "Story Points" for your board, you actually selected the original built-in Story Points field, which you are not actually using for your data. That is why the progress shows no data.

And, Estimation Statistic has to be a Number type of field. You can't use a Selection List type of field, as Jira is not designed to decipher if the available values are text or numbers.

[Olivia Medina]

Hello Trudy,

Thanks for your quick response; much appreciated.