Finding and listing the original value of a field using history for all records

[Ludovic Tremblay]

Hello,

I'm currently trying to build a report to illustrate the total investment within our various product lines through time. As all of our teams are working off of the same backlog I can easily get all the issues listed alongside their effort evaluation in terms of story points. Here's where it gets tricky : 

We use the field "story points" in our Jira issues to calculate the sprint capacity, but if issues carry over from one sprint to the other, certain teams review the story points associated to reflect the remaining work within the sprint while others don't. This creates a problem when trying to evaluate the total amount of work carried out over time because larger stories have a higher chance of slipping between two sprint, therefore reducing their size.

I currently have 442 issues that have slipped between sprints over the past 7 years and what I'd like to know is if there is a way to extract the list of issues with their original story point. I can manually extract the data for each record by looking at the history of each story and finding the entry which says "[Some user] updated the Story Points [Date] at [Time] none -> [number]", but doing this manually for 442 records is not very efficient.

Anybody has any creative idea on how to solve this problem?

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Ludovic Tremblay -- Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

First thing, given what "story points" normally represent, checking this value over such a long duration of years may not provide the desired information; the values likely have changed in meaning / value over time from team member, technology, process, etc. changes.  Regardless of that...

There may be marketplace addons / apps which allow easy consumption and parsing of the work item changelogs (i.e., history), so perhaps check there for approaches.

Without such apps, one would need to read the changelog entries for each work item one-by-one to identify the field changes over time.

Kind regards,
Bill

[Ludovic Tremblay]

Thanks Bill! You are right about the meaning of a story point over time and that's why we will balance these number with average sprint velocity and also compare it with other sources of control data.

[Valerie Knapp]

Hi @Ludovic Tremblay , welcome to the Atlassian Community and thanks for your question. 

If you have any budget available to build this report, I would recommend you check out eazyBI.

https://docs.eazybi.com/eazybi/data-import/data-from-jira/jira-software-custom-fields 

In eazyBI, there is the possibility to track and report on changes to the Story Points, see this excerpt here 

Story Points history

Historical total of Story Points of issues in the selected sprint. Used with Time dimension, shows the number of Story points at the end of a selected time period.

This measure is based on issue change history.

Story Points change

Story points increased or decreased compared to the previous period. It is calculated as a sum of hidden measures Story Points added and Story Points removed.

This measure is based on issue change history.

[Valerie Knapp]

Please check out eazyBI and my comment and let me know if you have any questions. 

Best wishes

[Ludovic Tremblay]

Thanks Valerie! I'll look into it and see if we can spare some budget for this.