Story Points and Number weirdness

Hi,

I converted our team to Jira 4 with GreenHopper 4. Still getting used to the GreenHopper section, and through reading various forum posts and docs I figured out how to add the Story Points field. The thing I love is that the Story Points field in Jira has this little pencil, you click and you get a popup of issues to compare the particular story for. The thing that is weird is that I have NO control over how GreenHopper is deciding how many points to assign the stories it is suggesting, and I seem to have no control over the story point allocation. It's all over the place. If I do an optimize I get story point numbers from 7-20 on one project 1-4 on another, it's all over the place.

That's the first problem.

The second thing is that for some reason I am simply unable to add the Story Point field to any of the GreenHopper cards. I'd like to be able to change the story points there. I looked at my jira configuration, and the story point field doesn't seem to have any kind of restrictive permissions. I have the Story Points field be applied in a global context to any type of issue. So I'm not sure why I can't see it in the cards add field list.

So the question is this:
1- How do I set a range of points that GreenHopper is going to work from. Is that even possible?
2- How is GreenHopper figuring out the points assigned to various issues? This is a fairly new install, and we're working on using some of the estimate time fileds, so I'm not sure that we have anything useful for GreenHopper to assign points to intelligently.
3- The custom field type is number searcher, I'm assuming that is the correct type.

Any clues you can give me to start making good use of Story points in Jira/GreenHopper would be great.

Thanks
R

Hi Boris,

To add story points in your GreenHopper projects you need to:
1) Add a Custom field of type Number (with Number Searcher) and associate it to the projects and issue types that will use it via the JIRA > Administration > Custom Field
2) Add the field to your issue card templates via the Agile > Tools - Configuration > CARD TEMPLATES
3) Add the field as a statistics via the "Stats" link on top of your planning board column

1) and 2) will provide the field to your selected issue type (like Story)
3) Will add the stats in your version boxes and add a set of charts accessible via the ChartBoard (like burndown, burnup, velocity charts)

The number field in the cards is a free text so the only constraint is for the entry to be a number. There is no restriction on the number itself.
We do have a request to support dropdowns as for points. This one will allow to restrict the value of the feild to a set of values.

I hope this helps.
You can always visit our doc here: http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/GH/GreenHopper+Quick+Start+Guide
Early next week we will be publishing GreenHopper 101 with some best practices and "how to" step by step configurations.

Cheers,
JC

jchuet wrote:

Hi Boris,

To add story points in your GreenHopper projects you need to:
1) Add a Custom field of type Number (with Number Searcher) and associate it to the projects and issue types that will use it via the JIRA > Administration > Custom Field
2) Add the field to your issue card templates via the Agile > Tools - Configuration > CARD TEMPLATES
3) Add the field as a statistics via the "Stats" link on top of your planning board column

1) and 2) will provide the field to your selected issue type (like Story)
3) Will add the stats in your version boxes and add a set of charts accessible via the ChartBoard (like burndown, burnup, velocity charts)

The number field in the cards is a free text so the only constraint is for the entry to be a number. There is no restriction on the number itself.
We do have a request to support dropdowns as for points. This one will allow to restrict the value of the feild to a set of values.

I hope this helps.
You can always visit our doc here: http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/GH/GreenHopper+Quick+Start+Guide
Early next week we will be publishing GreenHopper 101 with some best practices and "how to" step by step configurations.

Cheers,
JC

I saw those instructions before and sorry for making you type them in again. I think I see what I did wrong now, when I added the Story Points field, I added the Custom FIeld of type:

GreenHopper Ranking
Field that will hold the rank of the issue.

So ranking in this case is really on the order of importance as it relates to other stories or issues in JIra. I completely misunderstood the approach.

So my question then is, is it possible to have instead of a number field a drop down with number? Is there a caveat to that? If I don't want folks to enter any arbitrary number in that field?

Thanks again for the quick response this is some good stuff you guys have.

R

Hi Boris,

No worries.

As for now we only support the Number field and not the drop down.
But like I said in my previous answer, we do have a request to support it.
It will certainly meet your need.

Yeah the ranking field is actually what you will use to prioritize your issues.
Quite handy

In a very near near release we will focus on a "wizzard" to help with all this boring and not so easy configurations/settings. You are learning the hard way but that will make you a better JIRA user

Cheers,
JC

jchuet wrote:

Hi Boris,

No worries.
As for now we only support the Number field and not the drop down.
But like I said in my previous answer, we do have a request to support it.
It will certainly meet your need.

Yeah the ranking field is actually what you will use to prioritize your issues.
Quite handy

In a very near near release we will focus on a "wizzard" to help with all this boring and not so easy configurations/settings. You are learning the hard way but that will make you a better JIRA user

Cheers,
JC

Excellent thanks so much. It's not boring, just a little hidden and needs documentation (which I already read your comments about ;-)

I stepped on the custom field configuration by accident