No project estimate for kanban boards? Why is this only for scrum boards?

[eirens]

This article: https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirasoftwarecloud/configuring-estimation-and-tracking-764478030.html

Says, "Note that you can only configure estimation and time tracking for Scrum boards."

That's... weird.

Why can't we have project estimate for kanban boards? We can't use scrum boards as they're totally not a fit for how we run and how we want to run.

[Warren · Accepted solution]

Hi @eirens 

I was wondering about your comment re Kanban because we used to use a Scrum board but now use a Kanban board and we use time estimates. So I looked a bit closer at the article that you reference and here are my thoughts :

• Regardless of what type of board (Scrum or Kanban), you can use estimates - time or story points.
• You can only configure Scrum boards for estimation (as per the article) because this configuration is then used for reporting (burndown, velocity etc.) which are not applicable for Kanban.

So yes you CAN have project estimates for a Kanban board, but you can't configure it for reports which are meaningless.

I hope this helps. Let me know if there's anything relating to estimates within a Kanban board that you feel you aren't able to do.

[eirens]

Ooh! Thanks! That's likely good news. I'll dig deeper based upon what you've said.

[eirens]

Looks like we can't assign time estimates to individual issues and have those get summed for remaining project time though (in a kanban board). :( This is based on the response from @Nic Brough -Adaptavist- in which he says each board item is expected to be the same size (in pure/real kanban). That's too bad.

I hope there's a solution where we can use kanban boards in Jira and still have time-based estimates (each issue gets its own time estimate).

[Warren]

Hi @eirens 

As stated above, you can have time estimates for each individual sub-task - see screenshot below - the top 2 fields are custom fields we've created for Dev estimate and Test estimate

If you're using Tempo, the sub-task Original Estimate and Remaining Estimate fields do sum to the parent, BUT it doesn't show on the parent card on the board.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Because Kanban expects all items on the board to be the same size.  So your estimates/actuals are directly a result of volume.

If you're estimating on Kanban boards, you're not doing Kanban.  Of course the boards are useful in other ways for non-Kanban processes and I'd be surprised if the number of people using them as Kanban is in a majority.  But they've been built for Kanban.

[eirens]

Thanks, Nic.

[eirens]

Looks like the answer is there's no such ability until Atlassian implements this:

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSWSERVER-7265

I hope lots of people vote for it. :\

[Warren]

@eirens 

FYI You've tagged this question with "cloud" but the ticket you list is for server

Okay, just noticed it has an "affects cloud" label, so ignore this comment of mine