Story Points versus Issues

[Lorenzo Hidalgo]

Are the following statements correct?

It is important to understand the difference between Story Points v. Issues because it affects the way the Burndown Chart, Sprint Report, and Velocity Chart are measured.

• By default, Story Points are defined as an Epic or Story: https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/AGILE/How+do+I+set+default+values+for+Story+Points+when+adding+a+new+issue+to+Sprint
• An Issue can be multiple issue types: Epic, Story, Bug, Technical Task, Task, New Feature, and Improvement.

Therefore, when reading the Burndown Chart, Sprint Report and Velocity Chart, only Stories are being measured.

As Scrum Master, restrict User Stories only to the Product Owner. The Development team is free to use the other issue types, except for Story.

[Andy Nguyen · Accepted solution]

Hi Lorenzo,

You're right. Because Story Points are only available to Epic and Story, only issues of these types can be populated with Story Points, which will finally be used to generate Burndown Chart, Sprint Report, and Velocity Chart.

Other issues will also be available in Sprints according to the board's filter query, but won't be counted. One point I'd like to clarify is Epic is not treated the same as Story, but a group of Story. So the Story Points are all based on Story issue type in this sense. If you notice, Epic issues are displayed differently in Plan mode (not belonging to any Sprint or Backlog).

Cheers.

[Andy Nguyen]

Hi Lozenro,

No, Story Points is not an issue type like Epic, Story, Bug, etc. It's in fact a custom field of type Number which is, by default, available to only Epic and Story issue types. This field is among the ones used by JIRA Agile to estimate the amount of work and track the progress of work done in each issue. Because of this, it's used to generate Burndown Chart, Sprint Report, and Velocity Chart. Other Number fields which can also be used for this purpose can be found in Configuring Estimation and Tracking.

Cheers.

[Lorenzo Hidalgo]

Hi Andy,

Let me clarify, if I choose Story Points for Estimation Statistic and None for Time Tracking, then only Story Points associated with Epic and Story issue types will be used to generate the Burndown, Sprint and Velocity Charts?

My goal is to only include Epic and Story issue types that represent business requirements in Burndown, Sprint and Velocity in order to accurately estimate a schedule for business when the development team can deliver a product. All the other issue types that a development team may include in a Sprint will not impact those charts.