Roll-ups and hierarchy
Sum story points and time up through sub-tasks, stories, epics and initiatives — including levels joined by a link rather than a parent.
The Structure tab draws your work items as a tree and rolls numbers up it. This is the thing Jira itself will not do: an epic that shows the points of everything beneath it.
Where the tree comes from
RollGrid builds the tree from two things:
- Jira's own parent links. Sub-task → story → epic is free and needs no setup.
- Link levels you add. For anything above epics, or any shape Jira does not model as a parent.
Initiatives above epics are the common case. In many sites that relationship is an issue link, not a parent field. In the editor's Hierarchy step, add a link level and say which link type and which way it points — the options read "Parent … child (link type)", so pick the one with the initiative as the parent. RollGrid then treats the linked epics as children of the initiative.
Direction matters and is easy to get backwards. If an initiative shows no children, try the other direction before anything else.
Measures
A measure is one column of rolled-up numbers. In the editor's Structure tab, pick the fields under Roll-up columns; each then gets a Combine choice and, for sums, a mode. Add a count of work items column adds a count.
| Combining | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Sum | Add the values underneath, by the mode below |
| Average | The mean of every value at and below the row |
| Count | How many work items, ignoring any field (the checkbox) |
The mode is the part people get wrong
When a story has three story points and sub-tasks that add up to five, which number should the epic show? That is what the mode decides:
- Children if any — use the children's total when there are children, otherwise the item's own value. It is what stops a story being counted twice.
- Sum — add the item's own value and its children's. Right for time spent, where a parent's own logged hours are real work.
- Own value only — the item's own value, children ignored. Useful for an epic's original estimate as entered.
The defaults are chosen for this: story points use children if any, time spent and remaining estimate use sum.
Progress bars
A Structure tab can show progress by count of work items, or by any numeric field. Progress by points means "points in a done status, over all points in the row and below it" — the row's own points count too.
If nothing underneath has an estimate, RollGrid says "No points to measure" rather than showing 0%. Those are different statements and the second one is a lie.
Nothing underneath is not zero
A node with no values below it shows a dash (–), not 0. A real zero means someone estimated the work at nothing; an empty cell means nobody estimated it. Totals treat them differently too.
Large trees
Above 200 rows the grid gets its own scroll area and draws only what is on screen, so a 20,000-row report scrolls as smoothly as a small one (reading it from Jira still takes longer). Keyboard movement reaches every row — arrow keys, Page Up and Page Down, Home and End; Right opens a row and Left closes it or moves to its parent. Export uses every row. Printing uses every row that is open: collapsed branches stay collapsed, so press Expand all first if you want them on paper.