Automate a rule to calculate the cumulative sum for a field in each task, story ... etc in a project

[Leena K]

I'm trying to automate a rule to add the value of (Project Progress) for each task, story ... etc in a project in JIRA, I tried multiple approaches:

1. Schedule trigger every 7 min (didn't work)

2. when a field value change (didn't work)

[Jack Brickey]

Hi @Leena K , so what are you trying to sum exactly? Are you trying to some values across multiple issues? If so, your rule is missing that component. You would need something like lookup issues to retrieve all the issues that you are trying to sum across. Also, where are you going to store this value? It would have to be in a specific issue since you can't do it at a project level. it would be great if you could provide in more detail your use case. For example, a typical use case for summing up is where you might want to sum of the values in your sub-tasks and store it at the parent task level.

[Leena K]

How can I create a field on one task of the project? and how can i update a specific task? 

I was thinking of having the sum field on each task in the project which shows the same value.

[Jack Brickey]

You could consider creating a specific task simply to record the results. Or consider using an epic for this purpose. It is rarely useful to do this at a project level, unless the project has a short life span. More often people leverage Epics under a project as a sort of sub-project. In using an epic this custom field could be associated to that Issuetype.

[Hannes Obweger - JXL for Jira]

Hi @Leena K

welcome to the community!

Just as food for thought: Another option might be to use one of the various apps from the Atlassian Marketplace that offer sum-up capabilities.

As an example, I think your use case would be easy to solve using 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 range of advanced features, including support for issue grouping by any issue field(s) (including an issue's project), as well as sum-ups.

With these, you can build a view like e.g. this in just a couple of clicks:

This is really just one of a virtually endless number of views and reports - you can also group by, view, and sum-up any other issue fields, configure different sum-up modes, etc. etc. Issue grouping and sum-ups can also be combined with JXL other advanced features, including support for (configurable) issue hierarchies, bulk editing via copy/paste, or conditional formatting.

Plus, this all just works - there's no scripting or automation whatsoever required.

Any questions just let me know,

Best,

Hannes