Jira Align reports and screens may show invalid data if Jira Stories do not sync

Summary

If a scenario is implemented where Jira Epics sync into Jira Align, but due to a requirement to limit visibility of Story information to Jira users only, the synchronization of story level issues has been disabled, then this can cause issues in Jira Align that can negatively affect the content of multiple reports and screens. Even if a report or screen does not appear to specifically contain data relating to Stories, the effect of Stories not being created (synchronized) into Jira Align does affect upper level reporting.

Jira Align users may experience:

• Jira Align features are not seen in some reports or screens

• Incorrect statistical data (totals, averages, etc) in results as they are not based on the full list of Jira issues

Some examples of screens and reports that will have issues are the Feature forecast - average velocity, Program increment burndown by feature, and Work Tree reports, as well as the Program Board and Program Room screens.

Diagnosis

• Check that the features in Jira Align do have a complete list of expected child stories

• Check that one or more issues at the story level in Jira are children of epics that do sync to Jira Align features, but the story level issues do not sync to Jira Align

Cause

This is due to the way data is rolled up from lower levels of the Jira Align hierarchies into the reports and screens at the upper levels.

For issues/work items at the story/team levels, upper level reports may use:

• The total count of child stories under features - so if some Jira stories don't exist in Jira Align the count will be wrong

• Story Points (LOE Points) - missing stories in JA means missing points. The points are used as both totals and averages and affect load and velocity calculations

• Story Status / Process Step - the number of done/accepted stores against those with other statuses is used to provide progress information, so missing stories may show incorrect progress information

• Team assignments - features appear in some screens as related to teams based on the teams of their child stories, so missing stories can result in a feature not being shown as related to a team

• Sprints assignments - some reports and screens use the sprint assignments of child stories to show relationships to dates and also warn if work under a feature will not be completed on time

In a similar way, information presented in the Program/Feature level may also be used in the reports and screens used at levels above features.

ℹ️ The relationship; of values related to stories affecting report content at upper levels exists even without synchronization to Jira. This is because Jira Align requires stories to exist, as children of features, for a number of our screens and reports to work correctly. As such, the use of the Azure DevOps/ADO connector or not synchronizing outside of Jira Align will still show issues with report content if the expected stories do not exist in Jira Align ( or exist but are not set as children of the correct features in Jira Align)

Solution

Ensure that all Jira Stories that are children of synchronizing Jira Epics, do get created (synchronize) and also get the correct parent features, teams and sprint assignments in Jira Align.

If Jira needs to hold sensitive data in stories, then consider adding some custom fields into the Jira stories, that don't synchronize, to hold that sensitive data, and only write non-sensitive data into the title and description fields so that the required points, team, sprint & status information can then safely synchronize to Jira Align.