How is Percent Complete calculated?

Use ProductPlan's percent complete option to keep track of progress on your initiatives.

Nick Fields avatar
Written by Nick Fields
Updated over a week ago

A powerful feature in ProductPlan is the ability to represent project completion information on a roadmap. When you link a Bar or Container to an epic, story, or other issue type from one of our integrations, the percent complete can be updated automatically.

ProductPlan will automatically update the percent complete for all linked Bars and Containers once a day at 5 AM UTC. You may also manually sync your information at any time from your integrations page. Note that only the owner of a roadmap can run the manual sync.

Admins on Professional and Enterprise Plans can set newly created roadmaps to default to 0 percent Percent Complete. You'll find this in your Account Settings under the Roadmaps tab.

In order to calculate the percentage complete we use the following rules:

  • If a Bar is linked to a single standard issue (ex. a Jira story, or ADO issue) the percentage complete will reflect whether that item is complete or incomplete (0% or 100%) based on the linked issue's resolution status.

  • If a Bar is linked to a single parent issue (ex. a Jira or ADO Epic) the percentage complete will reflect the total completion of all the standard issues contained in the linked parent issue as children.

  • If a Bar is linked to multiple issues the percent complete will reflect the total completion of all linked standard issues and the standard type children of all linked parent issues.

  • Story points – Percent complete will be based on the assigned point values for completed issues. For example, consider an epic that has 2 stories: story A with 10 points, and story B with 5. Total points for the epic is 15. If story A is completed, but story B is not, the percent complete will calculate 10/15 points completed, equalling 67% complete. Story B’s points will not be counted unless the story is completed.

  • Number of stories – Percent complete will be based on the number of completed issues linked to the item in question. For example consider the same epic as the above situation. In this case, if story A is still completed but story B is not, the percent complete will calculate 1/2 stories completed, equalling 50% complete.

Synchronizing with Jira

In order to be considered complete, we will check the Resolution field of linked issues. Any Jira issue without a resolution value will be considered 0% complete; resolved issues will be considered 100% complete.

When linking to an Epic or to multiple stories, we will aggregate percentage complete based on all resolved stories.

Synchronizing with Pivotal Tracker

In order to be considered complete, we will check the State of linked items. Any stories with a State of “Accepted” will be considered complete. Stories that are in an unscheduled state (Icebox) are not part of the sum total of stories. When linking to an Epic or to multiple stories, we will aggregate percentage complete based on accepted stories.

Synchronizing with Trello

By default for each board, ProductPlan will select the list farthest to the right to indicate completion. To change this, you can choose a different list from the drop down on the Integrations page.

When a card is moved to the list selected as complete, any linked bars in ProductPlan will display as 100% complete. Any cards that are not in the complete list will display as 0% complete. ProductPlan will synchronize completion once a day automatically, or the owner of a roadmap can click “Sync Now” from the Integrations page at any time.

Synchronizing with Azure DevOps

Percent complete is calculated based on the full nest of child standard work items. Any stories with a State of “Closed” will be considered complete. If you have customized the State fields, any equivalent of “Closed” that results in a green state will be considered complete.

ProductPlan will count completion down to the story level. Linked stories can be considered either 0% or 100% complete. If you link at the Feature or Epic level, we will consider all child stories when calculating percent complete. If you’ve linked multiple stories to a Bar, we will count the aggregate of completed stories.

Tasks or bugs will be ignored when calculating percent complete.

Synchronizing with Github

When integrating with Github, you can link Issues to Bars or Containers in ProductPlan. We will base completion of linked Issues on their status in Github. All Issues with a status of “Closed” will be considered complete. Issues will be either 0% or 100% complete. If you link multiple Issues to single Bar or Container we will count the aggregate of complete Issues.

Troubleshooting

If you are experiencing issues with percent complete calculating correctly, there are a few things you can check:

  • First, remember that only the roadmap owner can manually update percent complete. If you are an editor, ask the owner to check this.

  • Make sure you’ve linked the issue through the integration tab, and not simply by adding a web link to the Bar.

  • Be sure that your Bar or Container is linked to the correct epic or issue, and that you have locked the percent complete, like the example below:

If you continue to run into issues, please contact support@productplan.com for additional troubleshooting.

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