Story Points don't populate in backlog until ticket is previewed (Also fixed!)

[chris_b]

Hi Community.

I'm posting this in case others run across the issue. It's unlikely to happen for many instances, but if you ever use the Jira Project import tool (for moving projects between different Jira sites), you may run into this problem. 

TLDR - Check the field contexts for duplicate/broken contexts.

A team member reached out and pointed out an issue where in the backlog of their scrum board, the Story Point field was showing a blank until you clicked the ticket and previewed it, then the numerical value would be populated.  It only happened on one site, and we have many sites.  If you refreshed, all values would vanish again - and you would get 0s for all the SP-Totals lozenges at the top of each sprint.

After a lot of googling for story point issues, someone mentioned they had the wrong Search Template selected, and by fixing that, the tickets would display correctly.  That was not the issue with our site - but it got me thinking about what could be changed on a custom field.
It turned out that the Jira import tool had created 4 empty global contexts, and those were causing the Story points to not render in the backlog estimations.

(so all our tickets in the backlog showed this:)




After deleting all the 'broken' contexts, the Story point values appeared as expected in the backlog.

(should look like this)




I hope this saves someone some time!

[Fabio Racobaldo _Herzum_]

Hi @chris_b ,

thanks for sharing the solution!

[chris_b]

You're welcome!

I found another issue the import tool caused, yesterday - I should post that one too.  Open sprints copied to a new site may actually end up breaking in exciting ways, causing you to have to delete copies of boards to allow users to open and close sprints.  (Weird, right?)

TLDR - that tool is dangerous, and you need to assume something will break.

[Kellen Ori]

I am also having this problem with points not showing until I select to preview the item and then they populate. Can you explain what I should be looking for with regard to the broken contexts? @chris_b 

[chris_b]

check to see if you have any new contexts on Story point at all (there should be only a global context, and no custom ones -- unless you're confident you can manage the technical overhead of more than one).  In any case, I'd start with only the global (Default) context for the story point field.  If there is another, delete that (After confirming how it works so you can recreate it if needed);