I've read various questions and answers and I'm really struggling to setup up a Project/Sprint/Story/SubTask to get what we think we need.
In terms of long term planning I've sold my team on the idea of Stories, estimates in Story Points, then measuring Velocity in Story Points.
The stories, however, can easily be quite big; taking a week or more to complete. This is because a lot of the work is essentially "Research something, then document it and output some options and recommendations (with relative merits, etc)". That nicely fits with a break-down into various sub-tasks; different topics to research being separate sub-tasks, documentation of each topic also being separate sub-tasks, final options and recommendations being another sub-task.
Where we're becoming stuck is that a burn-down chart in story points is next to useless for us. We see nothing happen for a week or more, then suddenly a massive percentage of the work is completed. So, we read about using Story Points for estimation and then adding time-tracking. https://confluence.atlassian.com/agile067/jira-agile-user-s-guide/configuring-a-board/configuring-estimation-and-tracking
As far as we understand it, and we may be wrong, we want the following process:
- Add a Story to the back-log, with a Story Point estimate
- When we move that Story in to a Sprint, create sub-tasks and estimate them in days/hours (but don't change the Story's Story Point estimate)
- As we work the Sprint, we log changes to Estimated Time Remaining on each Sub-Task
- Use a Burn-Down chart to track progress, the target being 0 hours remaining by the end of the sprint?
- Use Velocity based on Story Points to estimate capacity for future sprints
So far we have the Stories estimated in Story Points, and the configuration below for Time Tracking.
But we can't figure out how to set an Initial Time Estimate of the Sub-Tasks...