Story estimation on Kanban backlog

[Ashleigh Petrie]

I want to have the estimation component (number in grey circle) on the Kanban backlog board (Estimation.png). When i add it as a story point field it doesn't appear in the grey circle, it doubles the size of each ticket and just adds a number below. (See Kanban.png). 

How it currently is working:

Thank you

[Kian Stack Mumo Systems · Accepted solution]

That functionality is currently not availible with the Kanban backlog.

If you compare documentation for Kanban and Scrum, you will see this is not one of the listed functionalities. 

https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirasoftwarecloud/using-your-kanban-backlog-856846180.html

https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirasoftwarecloud/using-your-scrum-backlog-764478062.html

[Ashleigh Petrie]

Thank you for your answer. Would be great if they could add it as functionality 

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I doubt it will ever happen - the area at the top right is for the estimation statistic, which can only ever be one value.

[Andrea Hafner]

i am with all the other users on this topic who are requesting the estimation option. 

It would be very helpful to being able to add estimations to Kanban issuers. 

[Amy Strange]

Agree - it would be extremely useful to show the estimate on the kanban backlog, helps with prioritisation.

[Klaus Wissenwasser]

I would like to have the same functionality to have estimations in Kanban-Board. It helps you visualize effort on tasks on a glance. Also the estimation statistics would be great in an environment when you can't run "full scrum".

[Alex Marciuc]

That would be very useful for me as well.

[Leon Harvey]

I've lost faith in Atlassian ever doing something the community is actually keen on.

[Jimmy Fleming]

I would love to have the little gray circle with estimation (we use it for business value) in the Kanban board.

[Test]

Incredible that this isn't available by default and that they haven't added yet with Kanban practices as defined by LKU/David Andersen growing across the industry - Kanban isn't just first in first out, policies dictate work, and estimation, while not required in a WIP-centric model, nevertheless can be utilized for planning and replenishment.

[Chris Miller]

I updated my cards to include the Time Tracking, then set the backlog to show Original Estimate, which is not exactly what is requested, but it helps.

[Luk Lau]

It is definitely a must have feature

[Andrey Platonov]

This topic is two years old and still nothing has happened

[Kevin Portman]

This topic may be two years old, but there are suggestion tickets with Atlassian that are over seven years old!

JIRA Cloud: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSWCLOUD-7265
JIRA Server: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSWSERVER-7265

Please, if you come to this post, please also vote for the above suggestions so that Atlassian can get a clearer idea of the number of people who would like this added.

EDIT: please also vote for this more specific feature suggestion that was raised in 2017: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSWCLOUD-16957. It matches this question exactly.

[Thomas Eitzenberger]

Thats rather insane, please get this added to Kanbaan Backlog

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I suspect you're not seeing a lot of traction because Kanban already has estimation built into it...

[Nicola J]

I'm confused by this statement.

Yes the framework does but from an MI perspective, being able to record and track this information is useful. We can do it in a Scrum board but not on a Kanban board. This is inconsistent and means that if you need that MI, you are limited to either accepting the lack of this information in KanBan OR you're stuck with Scrum which is not best practice on a wider Agile level

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Kanban cards are the estimates in themselves, you don't estimate them separately.  Your MI is "how many cards are there in the column".  You could do an equivalence similar to the one do when scaling Agile up and having Kanban and Scrum teams in the mix, by having simple rules like "for Kanban team 1, a card is 3 story points, for Kanban team 2, it is 8 SP"  and so-on.

[Nicola J]

Ah so I'm interested in estimating time e.g. it should take 5 hours to do this task.

Out tasks aren't a set size by time, just complexity so being able to say this should take 5 hours but actually took 3 is a real bonus. 

You can do this in Scrum but not in Kanban within Jira? We have 10 teams across our platform and some work in scrum but others are more kanban focussed because that works better for them. I really don't want them to have to move to Scrum just to get estimation that we can actively report on embedded...

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

The estimation in Kanban is each card and when it's done, it's done.  You don't have a 5 point card that takes 3 hours and end up with a variance, Kanban cards are estimated at the same size and counted at that size when you finish them.  Hence 1 card = 1 unit of work = estimate = actual when completed.

Now obviously, people want kanban-like boards and want to do estimates on them.  But Jira diesn't directly support that in Kanban boards because it's not Kanban.

If you do want to use estimates, I tend to suggest you use a scrum board, but skip the sprints, or do placeholder ones for reporting only.