Sum of Kanban status points

[Selena Farris]

Is there a way to easily sum the number of points in the to do list on a kanban? 

Use case is we are using points as days of work (I know this is not how this was designed to be used), so being able to know the number of days we have in the planned, helps the sales team know approximately what the bandwidth is and the pipeline health. 

[Jack Brickey · Accepted solution]

Hi @Selena Farris , welcome to the community.

Yes, indeed that is an improper use of story points. Have you considered simply using original estimate field? This is exactly its purpose.

in any event, getting back to your question, your title suggest you want to sum a swimlane but the body of your post seems to indicate possibly summing the points in the To Do column. Could you please elaborate on exactly what your goal is?

[Selena Farris]

Hi @Jack Brickey , my bad on the title. I used 'swimlane' incorrectly clearly. As the description says, I would like to total by status. I will use the Original Estimate field (was not aware of this until now, so thank you), would just like to know if there is a quick way to sum.  

[Jack Brickey]

Great! Thanks for the clarification and update.

So, here is the thing, while you could create an automation to sum up the estimations you need somewhere to store the results. Typically people will use Epics for this purpose but I don't think it's right in your case. You could consider creating a dummy issue just to hold the values but that is not ideal. The best solution might be a third-party application that is designed to illustrate the sum of various fields in a table format. Alternatively, you could use the official Excel extension and run your JQL in an Excel spreadsheet that automatically calculates the data for you and even presented in a pivot table if desired.

not sure I was really able to help you here. Certainly not the answer you're probably looking for here.

[Selena Farris]

Thanks! Definitely points me in the right direction. 

[Selena Farris]

To close this out, I installed the RVS - Links Hierarchy app and added it to a dashboard view.  

[Hannes Obweger - JXL for Jira]

Hi @Selena Farris

if you're open to solutions from the Atlassian Marketplace, you may want to have a look at 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 number of advanced features, including support for (configurable) issue hierarchies, issue grouping by any issue field(s), sum-ups, or conditional formatting.

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 possible views - you can also group you issue by any other field(s), configure different sum-up styles (like sum, min, max, avg, etc.), and much more.

All this just works - so there's no scripting whatsoever required.

Any questions just let me know,

Best,

Hannes

[Danut M _StonikByte_]

Hi @Selena Farris,

You could use the gadgets offered by our Great Gadgets app to display the sum of Kanban Points for your board.

Issue Filter Formula gadget 

Advanced Issue Filter Formula gadget 

There are some other gadgets offered by the same app, that could help you with this, for example the Cumulative Flow Diagram gadget. See more in this article: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Software-articles/Building-a-powerful-Kanban-dashboard-in-Jira-with-Great-Gadgets/ba-p/1664331 

Hope this helps.

Danut. 

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @Selena Farris 

Where do you want that sum to be displayed?

The column headers on a board (scrum or agile) will show the count of issues in the column. There is not an option to show the sum of Story points or Estimates in those column headers.

With a Scrum board in the Backlog screen at the top of the sprints are bubbles that will show the totals for the board's Estimation Statistic, whether that is points or time. However these bubbles don't specifically match the Statuses in the columns. Instead the left most bubble is for the left most column of the board, the right most bubble is for the right most column, and the middle bubble is for all the columns in between.

Similar bubbles display on the Backlog screen for a Kanban board, but they show only issue counts as there is not an Estimation setting for Kanban boards.

[Selena Farris]

Thanks! I dont necessarily want to swap to a scrum board as we dont work in sprints, but will if it becomes cumbersome.

[Laurie Sciutti]

Hi @Selena Farris and welcome to the Community!  Kanban typically uses estimation fields for work since Kanban is based on continuous work whereas Story Points are typical for Scrum work.  What about using a Scrum board instead (Scrum has Active Sprints in Kanban format)...