Is there a way to enter "actual" story points once a story is complete, rather than asking members of my team to track their time each time they do work on a ticket?

[Elaine]

We estimate using hours for our story points. I want to see how well the team is estimating, so would like to determine a way to enter "actual time spent" on a ticket prior to the developer or tester closing it so we can see how close our estimates are or were.

[John Price · Accepted solution]

You could always add a custom field for tracking actual time spent, or you can turn on the Time Tracking feature in Jira which makes some estimate/actual fields visible.

However I'm not sure comparing estimated to actual story points is a useful activity. Story points are meant to be a fairly abstract, ball-park estimate of story size and complexity. Most teams use a modified Fibonacci sequence (1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20 ... ) or even a S/M/L/XL, Story points are to help the PO with planning future work and breaking up stories that are too big. We actively discourage people from mentally mapping SP to hours. For measuring how good the estimates were, we focus on:

1) Did the sprint get completed or not?

2) Over time, is the velocity of the team (in SP) getting better?

Hope this helps.