How to exclude issues with Resolution of Duplicate, Won't Do from Jira Reports and Epic Progress Bar

[Jacqueline Nosal]

Hi There, 

When referencing the Progress Bar in each Epic, as well as various Jira Reports, we have found that Jira does not seem to be able to detect when an issue is actually closed because it's a Duplicate/Won't Do, and not because it's actually Done. 

For example, in the screenshot attached, Jira says the Epic is "40% Done" as it is calculating it as 2 / 5 Stories Done. Ideally, we want to be able to exclude the ticket that is Closed as Duplicate/Won't Do, so Jira calculates it as 1 / 4 Stories Done instead (i.e. Epic is 25% Done). 

Similarly, when using the Epic Burndown charts, Jira will indicate 67% unestimated issues for an Epic, impacting its forecasting capabilities. However, when we dive into what those unestimated issues are, they are the tickets where we purposely erased the Story Point field as they were Closed due to being Duplicate/Won't Do. 



Looking for a way we can keep marking tickets as Closed (Resolution: Duplicate/Won't Do, etc.) instead of just Deleting them, and also have these excluded from Jira reports and the Epic progress bar. 

Thank you in advance for any suggestions and ideas! 

- Jacqueline 

[Trudy Claspill · Accepted solution]

Jira does not have anything natively to accomplish what you want. The reports are simply looking at whether or not the Resolution field has a value. If it has a value, the issue is considered "complete". It is similar for unestimated issues and Story points.

The simple solution for unestimated issues is to set the Story Points field to 0 rather than erasing it entirely. Issues are considered unestimated if they have no value entered at all. 0 is considered a valid estimation value for story points.

A hacky work around that just came to mind for the Epic Progress would be to convert those stories to sub-tasks and place them under another Story for all the "cancelled" work. As sub-tasks, they would no longer be factored into the progress calculation for your Epic. However the "Cancelled Work" story would be factored in. 

[Jacqueline Nosal]

This is amazing Trudy, thanks for taking the time to respond!

You're right that the one "Cancelled Work" story would still be factored in, but it would definitely be an improvement from before. We will give this a try, along with setting the Story Points to 0 for these kinds of tickets.

Really appreciate you taking the time to suggest solutions that work with what we're looking for!