How to report on story points or time when re-estimating means you lose original estimates

[mdaintondcc]

Hey all,

Got a question about how to report on activity against an epic that is not affected by re-estimating story points at the end of a sprint.

What I'm trying to achieve is a total of story points or time spent on a specific epic (so I can report back to a service area or manager). As our epics often span multiple sprints, how can I collate the total amount of effort spent delivering that epic when our story points for a particular task could reduce when they are re-estimated (the original total is lost seemingly).

This means we lose the ability to use story points as an indicator of total effort.

Have I completely missed a way to collate this or is there another mechanism for doing this? And is there a way to generate a report too?

Many thanks

Martin

[Trudy Claspill · Accepted solution]

Are you trying to report on actual effort spent on the issues? If so, I would suggest that you have your users use the Log Work option to log the amount of time spent on the issues, and then generate your report based on that.

Original Estimate of time is just that, an original estimate. It is not intended to reflect actual time spent.

Story Points, in agile, are also an estimate of the effort that will be required, and should not be tied to "time". Story points are intended to provide a rough estimate of effort relative to other stories. Stories assigned 1 point would all take approximately the same effort, and Stories that are assigned 2 points would take more effort than the 1 point stories, but the exact effort difference is not intended to be precise.

If you insist on reporting actual effort using Story Points or Original Estimate, then you could use an automation rule to copy those values to custom fields that you create to old the original values on those fields and then report using those custom fields.

[mdaintondcc]

@Trudy Claspillthank you, I'll take a look at those options. It may be that we are trying to do something that story points aren't meant to do.

[Andreas Haaken _APTIS_]

Hi @mdaintondcc , 

maybe something like a budget value may help you to store data over changes. Epic Sum Up (our plugin) does something like this:

[mdaintondcc]

Thanks @Andreas Haaken _APTIS_ will have a look at your plugin.