Calculated Field Using Calculated Field

Lauren Cordova
edited February 2018 in

Our group uses 3 levels of decomposition, and at each level the estimation of time to complete is more accurate.  For instance, when someone has an Idea (#1), the manager estimates the time to implement the Idea using something we've called an L0 estimate.  Then the system engineering team decomposes the Idea into Epics (#2) and re-estimates the time by including an "L1" estimate for each Epic.  Finally, the development team decomposes the Epics into Stories (#3) and provides an "L2" estimate to complete each story.  It is valuable to sum the estimates to the higher levels so we the most detailed/accurate estimate at each level; however, I am not able to select a calculated field within the calculated field menu.  I can think of manual ways to get around this (e.g. create an integer field that we have to manually populate at the Epic level with a value equal to the rolled up value), but with the number of items we have we would very much prefer an automated solution to avoid human error or simply forgetting to do a manual task.  Here's a summary of what I have and what I would like to do:

Idea Item Type Fields:
L0: Integer that's manually entered by management
L1: Calculated field to sum the L1 field on related Epics
L2: Want to automatically create this to sum the L2 field on related Epics, but Jama is not allowing me to select the L2 field

Epic Item Type Fields:
L1: Integer that's manually entered by systems engineering
L2: Calculated field of the L2 field on related Stories

Story Item Type Fields:
L2: Integer that's manually entered by development team

The use cases for this functionality are that we want to calculate accuracy of L0 estimates by determining the percent difference in the L0 and L1 fields as well as L0 and L2, when L2 estimates are complete.  In addition, we want the most accurate information at the Idea level to understand how long it will take to complete the Idea, which could affect ranking of the Idea on our development backlog.

LC