RollGrid for Jira Support

Sum story points for an epic in Jira Cloud

Jira shows an epic's own story points, not the total of the stories under it. Here is how to get the total.

Jira Cloud has no built-in total of the story points underneath an epic. The epic shows its own field, which is usually empty, and the stories each show theirs. Adding them up is left to you.

The five steps

  1. Open Apps → RollGrid and press Create report.
  2. Source: the space your epics live in. Or, for one epic only, choose A work item and everything under it and give its key.
  3. Switch on include children. Without it the report has epics and nothing beneath them, and every total will be empty.
  4. Tabs: keep the Structure tab the new report starts with. It already sums story points.
  5. Save.

You now have a tree of epics, each with the total points of the stories beneath it, and a progress bar.

Why the total is not double counted

If an epic has points of its own and stories that also have points, adding both would be wrong. The story points measure uses the children if any mode: where there are children, their total wins; where there are none, the item's own value is used.

That is the right default for estimates. It is the wrong default for logged time, where a parent's own hours are real work on top of its children's — so the time measures use sum instead. Both are changeable per measure. See roll-up modes.

"No points to measure"

If an epic shows this instead of 0%, nothing beneath it has a story point estimate. That is a different fact from "0% done", and showing 0% would imply work that has not been estimated is work that has not been started.

Including sub-tasks

Sub-tasks come in through Jira's own parent links, so they arrive with "include children" and need no setup. If your team estimates on sub-tasks rather than stories, the roll-up still works: the stories show their sub-tasks' total, and the epic shows the stories'.

Putting it on a dashboard

Add the Progress gadget to a dashboard and point it at this report. Each viewer sees the epics they can see in Jira. See gadgets and widgets.