Where the hours went on a late Jira epic

An epic is late, and the first two questions come together: where did the hours go, and what is it waiting on? Jira keeps every worklog and every link. No page puts them side by side. This page says what Jira adds up by itself, then answers both on one late epic: its hours with Logline, its blockers with Blockline.

What Jira does by itself

• Time spent on a work item is every worklog on that work item, from any date and by anyone. It leaves out the work item’s children.
• Time spent is all-time. It says how much went in since the first worklog, and nothing about which week. The work item view adds time one level up the hierarchy, and Atlassian’s note of 3 June 2025 on JRACLOUD-70150 says rolling up “doesn’t go beyond that”.
• Blocked is a link, not a status. A work item is blocked when another work item blocks it through a link, shown under Linked work items on each story. The epic has none of its own, so nothing on the epic says what it waits on.

So the hours are on the stories, the blockers are on the stories’ links, and putting them next to each other means opening each story.

Where the hours went, with Logline

Logline is our app. It reads the worklogs over the period you pick and puts them under their epic. The example is Holiday checkout, STOR-1, an epic with three stories in the demo spaces of our demo site. It is late.

1. Open the space’s Logline tab, or Apps › Logline with the space picked, and set the period under More periods to a custom range.
2. Set Rows to Epic, Then by to Work item and Columns to Week.
3. The epic’s row holds its stories’ time, and the arrow on a work item’s row lists its worklogs.

What the report says about STOR-1:

• 51h in all, from 11 worklogs, over six weeks: 8h, 8h, 9h, 12h, 10h and 4h.
• STOR-4, Payment step, took 36h of the 51h, and logged hours in every one of the six weeks.
• STOR-6 started the week of 28 Sep and STOR-5 the week of 5 Oct, with 9h and 6h.

Logline is not on the Marketplace yet; the waitlist is below, and its page on lineset.dev has it too.

What blocks it, with Blockline

Blockline is our app too. Its panel on the same epic leads with its level and the reason: At risk, “Blocked by PAYC-3 via STOR-4 · lands 5 Dec · 6 days after this epic’s date”. The epic’s date is 29 Nov, from its due date. Waiting on lists the three work items its stories wait on, each with the story it comes through:

• PAYC-3, Refund API, through STOR-4: At risk, due 5 Dec.
• DATA-2, Order events stream, through STOR-5: Watch, no date.
• MAPP-4, Shared address SDK, through STOR-6: OK, due 5 Nov.

Open the panel from View app actions, the hexagon under the work item’s title. Blockline is not on the Marketplace yet either; its page is on lineset.dev.

The two together

The story with most of the hours is the one waiting on the blocker that makes the epic late: STOR-4, with 36h of the 51h, comes through to PAYC-3, which lands 5 Dec, six days after the epic’s date. More hours on STOR-4 do not move PAYC-3’s date, so the question for the team is about that date, with the team that owns it.

Logline only reads worklogs. How a work item’s time is counted, hour by hour, is in Making the totals match Jira’s time spent. For the same figures on any epic and month, see Time logged per epic in Jira. More on the Logline home page.