Epic to story to sub task time estimating and roll up doesn't really work!

Ian Hayes February 11, 2014

We are trying to use SCRUM boards to manage progress on a sprint based project.

We have a number of epics. Each epic is decomposed into a set of user stories, and each story is decomposed into a number of sub tasks.

The first problem is that time logging at a sub task level isn't registered as progress at the user story level. I've seen a few postings here that say that this is how the product is designed to work, but its plainly counter intuitive to not support roll up of sub task estimates and progress.

Elsewhere I've seen suggestions that the way to address this is to remove the estimates from the story level, but in doing so this undermines aggregate estimates at the epic level. Hence, if I remove user story level estimates there are no estimates available at an epic level - again this is plainly counter intuitive.

My inference is that you already have the correct aggregation logic for estimates and remaining time delivered for how 'epic' stories work. Why can't the same logic be introducted for user stories and sub tasks??

My suggestion would be to:

* Add a project level configuration option that allows parent issue time estimates and remaining time values to be drawn from subordinate issues where such child issue data exists

* Alternatively add some extra fields at an issue level for storing the aggregate child issue time estimates and remaining time values.

4 answers

3 votes
John Alton September 30, 2015

@Atlassian - Could someone please share a method to see the total estimated hours for (child) stories and sub-tasks rolled up to the (parent) Epic issue? Or share if there is a change on the JIRA and/or JIRA Agile roadmap to enable it? 

thanks, 
John  

1 vote
Helena W March 23, 2016

I also find the current situation confusing with what gets rolled up and what not.

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The new Portfolio Live plans for example seems to do what we would expect:

- Epic estimate shown as (epic original estimate + linked story original estimate + linked story subtask estimates).

  • Possible bug here: epic subtask estimate doesn't get rolled up.

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But in JIRA Software the epic displays as (epic original estimate + epic subtask estimates) with linked stories estimates not taken into account.

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So if I want my JIRA Software Epic estimates to be rolled up correctly I would be forced to use Epics + subtasks. But then my JIRA Portfolio live plan will display incorrectly. 

Or perhaps I should then not use Epics and only use stories and subtasks in JIRA Software as they roll up as expected in JIRA Software and Portfolio.

0 votes
Heidi Bellio April 17, 2018

same here. i'd highly appreciate to have a solution working with portfolio AND the jira view

0 votes
Asad Saqib February 10, 2015

I am having the exact same issue. Please let me know if a resolution was found for this problem. 

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