Backlog shows 0 in "Original Time Estimate" for stories with sub-tasks?

[Emil Bergwik]

Hi guy,s

We've just had our first round of sprint planning in the new team, and couldn't manage to set things up properly when working with stories and sub-tasks. We're splitting stories into multiple sub-tasks and time estimating those. Now I want the sum of all time estimates for the sub-tasks to show up in the backlog for each story, so that we know how much work we can take on each sprint, without having to manually enter the sum of those hours / days manually for each sprint.

This is what I've done so far:

• I have time tracking enabled for my project,
• I have enabled the time tracking fields for the related screens,
• My board has Estimation set to Original Time Estimate,
• The stories have the Include sub-tasks checkbox checked,
• In the details view for my stories the sum of the "Estimated" and "Remaining" time of its sub-tasks are correctly displayed (see screenshot),
• The backlog just shows "-" for the stories that have estimated sub-tasks and the sprint time estimate summary only aggregates on the stories/improvements that have estimates (see screenshot),

I've googled like crazy, and there seems to be many results pointing to the fact that this should work. Any ideas?

Thanks in advance.

[Petter Gonçalves · Accepted solution]

Hello Emil,

Thank you for raising this question.

Unfortunately, it is not possible to sum the estimation of sub-task issues in their parent Story.

There's a feature request opened with a long discussion about this behavior where several customers have reported the same need as you:

- Sum estimates from sub-tasks in user stories

That being said, due to a large number of customers requiring this functionality, our developers have prioritized this requirement on their Roadmap.

Please, feel free to vote and watch this feature to increase its priority and be aware of any updates. Additionally, there are several customers explaining their scenarios and providing workarounds for this lack, so please feel free to take a look and check if any options are applicable to your business-case, Emil.

Let us know if we can still help you with anything.

[Emil Bergwik]

Thanks for that clarification! Too bad its not there yet, seems like all the mechanisms are in place to make it happen though? I mean, the aggregate hours of all sub tasks are being shown in the story details view? Maybe that's computed as the page is loaded though, which could require quite a bit of calculation if looking at a backlog containing a long list of stories, each one with sub-tasks estimated?

Without the sub-task estimations being shown in the backlog view, I can't really see how we would work with this in a sprint planning session, as its really hard to get an overview of how much work we can take on (without assigning story points on the story or something..).

I'll go vote for that straight away.

[Petter Gonçalves]

You're welcome, Emil.

Indeed, I've already worked with other customers having this same need and I completely understand how this feature would be useful and, for most of the cases, more coherent to configure your estimations.

I hope our developers find a way to Implement this functionality soon.

Have a nice weekend and let me know if you decide to implement one of the workarounds commented in the feature request and need any help with this.

[Younas Qazi]

@Petter Gonçalves  were you developers finally able to prioritize this request over the other ? 

As I can see: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSWSERVER-5614 it's pending since 2012... How much more time do they need to prioritize ?

[Denis Melskiy]

Our team is also highly interested in this feature, also it seems 1765 votes on the issue already.

[JorjGaidin]

Did they forget about this issue?  Still not implemented in 2023