Additional Changes Coming to Estimation Conversions

Last fall in version 10.85, we made a few exciting enhancements to the Estimation Conversions settings panel, allowing users to configure conversions separately for epics, capabilities, and features. We also established member weeks as the primary pivot for calculations, through the addition of the field, How many story points does one person deliver in one week?

After letting this saturate, it became clear that creating three primary MW pivots, one for each work item type dropdown, introduced too much complexity. As we prepare some game-changing updates to the entire financial calculations system, only one conversion between MW and story points is necessary; additional fields break key logic. After all, this number of story points delivered by a member of your organization is intended to be a standard, regardless of your estimation setup for any of the higher-level work items.

In the release of version 10.93, we will be updating the settings panel so that it uses one global MW → points field for all three work items. Member week estimations can still be customized to each work item type. For example, for features, a T-Shirt size of X-Small = 2 MW while for epics, an X-Small = 10 MW.

This change may affect your instance if you’ve entered different values into the member weeks pivot field for different work items. In these cases, Jira Align will use the MW → points value entered into the field when the work item type dropdown is set to Epic. For example, if your estimation conversion settings currently has “1 MW = 5 story points” configured for epics but features have “1 MW = 2.5 story points”, all feature estimations will change to use the configured value for epics, meaning their conversions from MW to points will be 5 points, instead of 2.5.

We’ve also updated the language above the MW to points field, adding As a standard to the beginning of the question. This clarifies that the value should be a general standard across your organization and not a precise measurement.

We wanted to let you know about these changes in advance, so that you may prepare your test and production environments accordingly, and revisit your estimation conversion settings. This will prepare your Jira Align instance for future enhancements that will make financial cost calculations streamlined and easier to understand.