Handling Estimates in Epics (sum vs. limit)?

[Kristian Rink]

Hi everyone;

we're excessively using Jira for project planning in our internal processes (development, consulting), which includes time planning. Usually this works like that:

- There's a Jira Project for each customer and a Jira Epic inside that for each project we do with the customer.

- The project usually has a negotiated time budget which currently is placed in the epic as estimate (like "15 days").

- Actual work happens in tasks that belong to that epic. The project managers responsibility is to create these tasks and add time slots to them, making sure the project stays in budget.

That flow, currently, works well except for the estimates: At the moment, the epic estimate does in no way relate to the estimate in the tasks. It's difficult to, while adding tasks, see how much time is actually planned in individual tasks (compared to the epic as a whole). Is there a solution to improve this? Two ideas we had:

- Can we set up Jira in a way to make task estimates sum up in the epic estimate rather than having the epic estimate pre-set?

- Ideally: Can we add both an "planned" (pre-set) and a "real" (calculated from subtasks) estimate to epics to have a faster overview of how current planning state is?

In some ways, the workflow for tasks/subtasks in this case is pretty close to what we need, only that it doesn't work for epic/task. Any ideas or hints on that...?

Thanks in advance and all the best,

Kristian

[Rahul_RVS · Accepted solution]

Hi @Kristian Rink 

You might also want to try out our add-on to get your complete Epic Hierarchy.

Agile Tools - Epic Tree and Time in Status 

It will provide you the below features

• Sum up your Epic's Time Spent, Original Estimate, Time Remaining, and Percent Complete
• Display and manage Epics/Issues of your project
• Edit Issue summary, time estimates, story points and assignee on the tree with real time updates in the progress
• Rolled up percentage completion and at issue level as well
• JQL based Time in Status Report

[Thorsten Letschert _Decadis AG_ · Accepted solution]

Hi @Kristian Rink ,

While I'm not aware of any out of the box solution that handles your use case, taking a look at sumUp for Jira might be worth the time. Beyond lots of other features, its built-in custom fields should help with your exact scenario - see the documentation of the Epic's progress use case.

Disclaimer: I'm part of the team behind the aforementioned app.

Cheers
Thorsten

[Kristian Rink]

Thanks all. I'll have a look and see whether any of these addons suits our needs (and whether I can have budget for that. ;) ). So far, we need some way how to implement this internally without turning this into a huge project. Still hope this is somehow possible..

Thanks again and best regards,

Kristian