Plan your sprints with smart estimates!

While supporting many agile projects and scrum teams regarding methods and tools we very often encountered a serious gap in the standard JIRA scrum board. Typically a development team needs to check the distribution of workload on the team members basing on the work breakdown, estimations and assignments of the user stories. But this is not easily done for two reasons: first of all JIRA does not completely show sums of sub tasks and secondly there is no comparison to available capacity (project assignments).

The new popup directly provides up to date sums of remaining efforts of tasks and / or subtasks in the selected sprint and compares it to the planned assignments for the respective timeframe. As teams are using different approaches for estimation different aggregation methods (view modes) can be selected.

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We start with sprint planning. Compare estimates of the team of subtasks and/or stories with the planned assignments.

1: Open the popup by clicking on 'estimate vs assigned' button on the JIRA Agile Board.

2: Choose a view mode (aggregation method) for summing up the remaining estimations of stories and / or subtasks:

Parent Issues only: Estimations of Backlog entries will be summed up (like in JIRA standard).
Sub Tasks first: Estimations of sub tasks will be summed up, if they exist. Otherwise the estimation of the parent issues will be added. (Default)
Sub Tasks only: Estimations of sub tasks will be summed up, if they exist. Estimations on parent issue level will be ignored at all with this method.
Both: Estimations of the parent issue AND the subtasks are summed up.

Check out example below!

3: The sprint can be selected here: running or closed sprints or a sprint in preparation (not started yet).

As a sprint in preparation has no start and end dates before it is started these have to be selected in the calendar fields below.

You can see the assigned issues by clicking the arrow next to the assignee's icon.

Estimations in JIRA Agile Board (Backlog)

Estimations in JIRA Agile Board (Active sprints)

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Example for aggregation methods (view mode):

Parent Issues only: Result is 1 week as just estimation of parent issue (Backlog entry) is estimated.
Sub Tasks first: Result is 1 week 3 days as subtasks exists for this parent issue, so subtasks will be summed up and parent estimation is ignored.
Sub Tasks only: Result is 1 week 3 days as only subtasks are summed up.
Both: Result is 2 week 3 days as estimations of the parent issue AND the subtasks are summed up.

Now the sprint is running for some days. As remaining estimations are used in column estimate you can compare to current assignments.

For a running sprint adjust the start date to the current date to get the assignment data for the remaining sprint duration!