Total remaining estimate of blocking work items

Configuration

Create a Custom smart number field and use the General parsing mode.

Expression

%{sum(append(fieldValue({issue.remainingEstimate},linkedIssues("is blocked by")),[0]))
/60}

If the resulting number from the expression contains too many decimal numbers, feel free to select one of the available display formats or to configure it manually.

Display as

Number

Formatting style

Default (unformatted)

Used parser functions

• sum()

• append()

• fieldValue()

• linkedIssues()

Details

1. What does the expression do?

This expression calculates the total remaining time estimate (in hours) for all work items that are blocking the current work item. In other words, it sums up how much work is left on all items that the current work item is waiting on, and shows the result in hours.

2. Step-by-step breakdown

Let’s break it down:

• linkedIssues("is blocked by"): Finds all work items that are linked to the current work item with the link type "is blocked by". These are the items that must be completed before the current one can proceed.

• fieldValue({issue.remainingEstimate}, ...): For each of those linked work items, this retrieves their "remaining estimate" value (the estimated amount of work left, usually in minutes).

• append(..., [0]): Adds a zero to the list of remaining estimates. This ensures that if there are no linked work items, the list isn’t empty, which prevents errors in the next step.

• sum(...): Adds up all the remaining estimates (including the zero if there were no linked items).

• /60: Converts the total from minutes to hours (since Jira stores time estimates in minutes by default).

3. Examples

• If the current work item is blocked by two other work items, one with 120 minutes and one with 60 minutes remaining, the calculation would be:

  • (120 + 60) / 60 = 3 hours

• If there are no blocking work items, the result is:

  • (0) / 60 = 0 hours

4. Real-life use cases

• A project manager wants to see, for any given work item, how much work is left on all the tasks it depends on before it can start.

• A team lead uses this field to quickly identify bottlenecks by seeing which work items are blocked by a large amount of remaining work.

• In sprint planning, this helps teams estimate when a blocked work item might become unblocked, based on the remaining effort on its dependencies.