How to update the Epic progress bar with completed subtasks?

[Joost van Rietbergen]

Hi All,

In Jira we work with Epic -> Task -> Subtask. In the Epic card, we use the "Add Child Issue" functionality to create Tasks. In the subsequent Task cards, we use the "Create Subtask" functionality to create subtasks.

We use the progress timeline bar of an Epic to track how work is progressing. Both Epic and Task have such a progress bar. 

My issue is the following which I will explain with a simple example: An Epic has 4 Tasks, created as Child Issues. Each Task also has 4 Subtasks (created as subtasks). This means the total amount of work needed to complete the Epic is 16 Subtasks.

The team has finished 3 out 4 Tasks, meaning the progress bar in the Epic shows 75%. However, for the last remaining Task, actually 2 out of 4 tasks are already completed (so this Task is completed for 50%). 

The problem is this does not count towards the progress bar of the Epic itself. It is thus not possible to track the progress of the total amount of work (which is subtasks). I am looking for a functionality to in this case have the epic show that 87,5% of work is completed (14 out of 16 Subtasks).

Best,

Joost

[Hannes Obweger - JXL for Jira]

Hi @Joost van Rietbergen

you are correct that Jira's progress calculation doesn't quite work like that; to the best of my knowledge, you'll need extra tooling. A few directions forward:

• I haven't done this myself, but you may be able to calculate the progress using Jira Automation. This article describes how you can aggregate time tracking information up to epics; perhaps you can modify the logic to calculate progress, too.
• You'll almost certainly find an app in the Atlassian Marketplace that can help with this. I myself work on an app in which this would be trivial to do; I'll provide more information below. 

[Hannes Obweger - JXL for Jira]

Just to expand on the last point, this is how this would look in the app that my team and I are working on, JXL for Jira:

JXL is a full-fledged spreadsheet/table view for your issues that allows viewing, inline-editing, sorting, and filtering by all your issue fields, much like you’d do in e.g. Excel or Google Sheets. It also comes with a number of advanced features, including support for (configurable) issue hierarchies, as well as sum-ups. With these, you can create views like the above one in just a few clicks.

As said above, there may be other apps that can help with this, too. You may already know that you can trial any app for free for 1 month, and depending on the size of your size, it may be free forever. So if an app is an option for your, perhaps try a few and see which works best for you.

Any questions just let me know,

Best,

Hannes