Why is it necessary to define story points while creating an epic from the Story Map

[Bob Hunt]

The Story Map seems to be a great tool for planning the project, defining and rearranging epics / stories etc. but seems to have an inconsistency that hinders it's usefulness.

While trying to 'Create Epic' from the Story map the 'Story Point' field is a required field. However, creating Epics from within the Main screen is possible without Story Points (In fact there isn't even a field for this in the 'Create Epic' dialog box).

During our early planning we will begin to define the Epics but would generally not get to story point esitmation until later on when we deal with the individual 'Storys'.

The current behavior reduces the utilitiy of the 'Create Epic' functionality within the Story Map pretty significantly. IMHO

Does anyone know why story point estimates are required when creating epics within the Story Map utility?

[Florian Bauer · Accepted solution]

Hi Bob,

story points are necessary to calculate the progress bars used at epic level and at the filter view. That is why it is a mandatory field - but you just can fill it up by a zero.

However you are right - if a story is created within jira or gh it is not a mandatory field neither - we should think about to change the behavior in a next version.

cheers,

Florian

[Bob Hunt]

Thank you for the response Florian. I think we can use zero for our planning. I'd like to understand a bit better how the addition of story points later on (as the stories are developed) impact this progresss bar. I'll play around with this a little more in our test environment.

[TSO Logic Admin]

But I was under the impression that story points were going to roll up to the Epic. But apparently that is not so. Correct?

-Johnny

[Bob Hunt]

Entering a default value of 0 to create the epics works fine.

Thank you for the help Florian!

[Timothy]

Not sure what you mean by Story Map but creating an Epic in the board itself by passes the field configuration.

[Bob Hunt]

I'm using the Agile User Story Map plugin (https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.bit.agile.bit-storymap). Within this plug-in there is a 'Create Epic' link which brings up a Dialog Box. Within the Dialog box you have Summary (mandatory), Description (Optional), Story Points (mandatory) andf then a 'Version' drop box to select the targeted version.

The workflow we would like to establish is to work within the User Story Map plug-in and define our Epics there.