Sub-tasks and Remaining Time Burndown

[Luke McKenzie]

We are working somewhere between Agile and Waterfall.

We are using Stories and Tasks, with sub-tasks as the child. Original Estimate, Time Spent and Remaining Estimate are recorded on the sub-task level however they are not showing up on the burn down chart.

Strangely, burn down is working for team 1 but not for teams 2 and 3. Im comparing settings and viewing tickets but I cannot see what the difference is.

In the board setting we have set up estimations:

Any advice very welcome!

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

Sub-tasks should not have sprint estimates added to them.  They are not sprint items, they are fragments of other sprint items, and hence do not have anything to feed into your velocity (their estimates are part of the estimate for the sprint item they are a part of)

I guess that team-1 is not putting estimates on their sub-tasks (or possibly not using sub-tasks at all), whereas the others are.

[Luke McKenzie]

Hi Nic, thanks for the reply.

Team 1 had some estimates/time spent/remaining at Story and some at Sub-task level, so perhaps the burn down chart was only showing those at story level.

Haven spoken to a few scrum masters, consistent advice was to do it at one level or the other hence we went down the route of sub-task level as the work log rolls up to the story level (in the UI at least) and it's really helpful to see what effort is left at each sub-task within the story.

In short - are you saying that the sum of the sub-tasks, rolled up to the story will not show on the burn down chart for remaining time, only story / task / bug level?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Yes, the scrum masters you have spoken to did not understand that you were talking about sub-tasks.

If they had, they would have told you that only the story estimates matter in Scrum, and that if you want to put them on sub-tasks (which is not a bad practice), you need some (hopefully automated) strategy to get them accumulated up on to the issues of which they are a part.

The burn down charts only look at sprint items, and sub-tasks are not sprint items.

[Luke McKenzie]

Thanks @Nic Brough -Adaptavist- not the answer I was hoping for but an answer nonetheless. Appreciate your responsiveness, thanks again.