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How to track multi-team or scaled-agile projects (such as SAFe®) in Jira with Great Gadgets app

It is well known that project monitoring is a key-factor for the success of every project. It involves tracking the project metrics, progress, and associated tasks to ensure everything is completed on time, on budget, and according to project requirements and standards. Project monitoring also includes recognizing and identifying roadblocks or issues that might arise during the project’s execution, and taking action to rectify these problems.

In a scaled agile environment, like Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®) for example, where multiple agile teams work on the same release, the project tracking can be difficult to do. As Scrum Master, PO or team member you need to see if your team is on track with its contribution to the release, while as a Release Manager or Release Train Engineer (RTE) is essential to track the entire project release or Agile Release Train (ART) from the first to the last iteration of every product increment, in order to identify the potential problems and to keep the sponsors up-to-date with the overall progress.

In this article we present a method for tracking a multi-teams project release in Jira. It consists in creating and using powerful dashboards in Jira by using the gadgets offered by the Great Gadgets app, for tracking not only the overall release, but also tracking the work of every agile team that works on that release.

One dashboard for the entire release, one dashboard for every team

Our recommendation is to create one dashboard for tracking the overall release, and one dashboard for every team that works on that release.

For consistency, the team-specific dashboards should have the same structure (same gadgets), but obviously, configured to display their own specific data.

Metrics and charts to track

Below is a list of metrics and charts to be tracked with these dashboards. Even if some of them are “standard” metrics of Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®), they are applicable in any multi-teams project.

Release Burndown Chart

This chart displays the burndown chart for the entire release. It shows the current scope (total amount of work planned) and the current remaining work vs. expected remaining work (ideal line) indicating if the release is on track or not. It is an essential chart for tracking the overall all progress of your release or ART, so this is a “must” for your release dashboard. You should also add this to the team-specific dashboards, but to configure it do display only the data of that specific team.

You can display this chart on your dashboards by using the Release Burndown Burnup Chart gadget offered by Great Gadgets app for Jira. For tracking the entire release you have to configure it to use a Jira filter that returns all the Jira issues from that release. For tracking the release part of a specific team, you have to configure it to use a Jira filter that returns all the issues from the release that belong to that specific team. Optionally, you can choose to display forecast and milestones. At your choice, it can calculate by story points, issue count, time estimates or by any numerical custom field.

Flow Load

This chart indicates how many items are in every stage of the workflow. It is a stacked area chart that shows the number of items in each column of the board or in each workflow status along the time. It helps you to determine how stable your flow is and to understand where you need to focus on making your process more predictable. It gives you quantitative and qualitative insight into past and existing problems. Flow Load is a standard metric in SAFe®. You should have this chart on both release and team-specific dashboards.

You can add this chart by using the Cumulative Flow Diagram (CFD) gadget offered by Great Gadgets app. All you have to do is to create a filter in Jira for the entire release and a filter for each specific team and then configure the gadgets to use them. For the release dashboards, the bands should be generated by issue statuses or by issue status categories. For the team-specific dashboards, it should be configured to generate the bands based on the columns of the team agile board. It’s up to you how the numbers will be calculated: by issue count, story points or other criteria.

Flow Velocity / Throughput

This chart displays the amount of work completed by the team in a given specific time interval like past iterations or program increments as well as the current average velocity. Flow Velocity is a standard metric in SAFe®. It is also known as “throughput”. It helps you to see how productive the team is in time and how much they delivered. This chart is a “must” for the team-specific dashboards. You should also display it on the release dashboard, but configured to display the data of the entire project team.

To display this chart on your release dashboard, use the Kanban Velocity gadget offered by Great Gadgets app configured with a filter that returns all the issues from the release. For the team-specific dashboards, you can use the same Kanban Velocity gadget, but configured to use a filter that returns only the issues of that team.

Or, if the teams use Scrum boards in Jira, use the Team Velocity gadget offered by the same Great Gadgets app for Jira.

Both these gadgets support calculation by issue count, story points, time estimates or other custom fields.

Flow Time Histogram

This chart calculates the total time the issues took to go through the workflow and displays the distribution of the values as a series of bars in the form of a histogram. It helps you determine how fast the issues are resolved, the average flow time, and how many issues had their flow time in acceptable ranges and how many did not. Flow Time is a standard metric in SAFe®. It is useful to display on both release and team-specific dashboards.

This chart can be displayed by using the Cycle Time Histogram gadget offered by Great Gadgets app. Depending on what flow time you want to measure, you can configure it to calculate the “cycle time”, “lead time” or time between two specific workflow statuses. Optionally, you can specify a threshold to easily identify the outliers.

Flow Time Trend

This gadget calculates the total time the issues took to go through the workflow and displays their average for the past time intervals representing for example, the 2-weeks long PI iterations. Use this gadget to see how fast your team delivers in time, how quickly the issues are marked as done along the time. It is useful to display on both release and team-specific dashboards.

This chart can be displayed by using the Cycle Time Trend gadget offered by Great Gadgets app. Depending on what flow time you want to measure, you can configure it to calculate the “cycle time”, “lead time” or time between two specific workflow statuses.

Flow Distribution

This chart presents the amount of each type of work (stories, bugs, enablers, etc.) along the release. Flow distribution is a standard metric in SAFe®.
It is helpful to track this metric in order to determine if there is a good balance between the amount the work for developing new features versus the amount of work on tasks for reducing technical debt, for example. It is useful to add on the release dashboard.

To display this chart, add the Cumulative Flow Diagram (CFD) gadget offered by offered by Great Gadgets app to your dashboard and configure it to generate the bands by issue types. Choose to calculate by issue count or by story points.

WIP Aging Chart

The Work In Progress (WIP) aging chart displays the “in-progress” items along with their age (time in status or time in board column) in a scatter-plot chart. You can use this gadget to easily identify the issues that stay longer than expected in their current workflow status. Simply hovering the mouse over an issue of the chart will display a tooltip with the issue key and its age. It is useful to have it on both release and team-specific dashboards.

This chart can be displayed by using the WIP Aging Chart gadget offered by Great Gadgets app. Also, it allows specifying a threshold line to identify those issues that have an age that exceeds the acceptable value.

Visualize WIP

This is an essential gadget for every team-specific dashboard because it shows the task board with the work-items from the current iteration in their current status or board column. The color of the cards is given by the issue’s hierarchy: purple for epics, green for stories or tasks and yellow for sub-tasks.

It might be useful to have such gadget at the release level as well, but by displaying only the high level work-items, like features or stories, because this gives you a quick idea and overview about what is in work at the current time.

You can display this on a team-specific dashboard by using the Team Wallboard gadget offered by Great Gadgets app and by configuring it to use the Jira agile board of the team and its current sprint. For displaying it on the overall release dashboard, first create a filter with the high level items (features, epics, etc.) from the release that you want to visualize and then configure the gadget to use this filter. Alternatively, you could use a Jira agile board that includes the items from all the teams.

Sprint Burndown Chart

This chart displays the burndown chart for the current iteration/sprint. It shows the current scope (total amount of work planned) and the current remaining work vs. planned remaining work (ideal line) from the sprint. This chart should exist on every team-specific dashboard.

You can display this chart on your dashboards by using the Sprint Burndown Burnup Chart gadget offered by Great Gadgets app for Jira. You can configure it to calculate by story points, issue count, time estimates or by any numerical custom field. Can be also configured a sprint burnup chart.

Project Key-Numbers

Complete your Jira dashboards by calculating and displaying other important numbers for your team or release, like percentage of work completed, bugs ratio or remaining budget.

The Advanced Issue Formula Gadget offered by Great Gadgets app allows displaying up to 6 cards with numbers calculated based on simple or more complex math formulas applied against the fields or the count of the issues from multiple Jira filters. You can use this gadget to display the key-numbers on both the overall release and the team-specific dashboards.

In the end, your Release – Overall dashboard should look like this:

And the team-specific boards should look like this:

That’s all. If you have further questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us at support@stonikbyte.com.

Conclusion

Tracking a project with multiple teams in a scaled agile environment is as important as it is a complex task for any Scrum Master, PO, Release Manager or RTE. But with StonikByte’s Great Gadgets app you can create powerful Jira dashboards that allow tracking the project and the teams’ work in an efficient and effective manner.

About StonikByte

StonikByte is an Atlassian Gold Marketplace Partner and the author of various apps (add-ons) for Atlassian Jira, which includes:

Great Gadgets for Jira – a gadgets pack for tracking projects in an agile manner. Includes gadgets like sprint and release burndown / burnup charts, team velocity, issue field sum-up, cycle time, work breakdown structure (WBS) and more.
Documents for Jira – a document management system for Jira where you can store and manage your project-related files.
Project Team for Jira – an app that makes visible the project teams, allows extending the user profiles by adding custom fields, generates and displays org-charts.

To find more about StonikByte, please visit https://stonikbyte.com/.

Tracking an agile project that uses time estimates with Great Gadgets for Jira

Not all the agile projects use Story Points for estimating the backlog items, like stories or tasks. Some projects use time estimates (work hours or work days) while some others also track the time spent on every backlog item or sub-task on a daily basis. Tracking such project that uses time estimates in an agile manner, by using the agile specific tools like burndown or burnup charts, might be difficult because the big majority of the agile tools are based on Story Points calculation.

Here we describe how Great Gadgets app for Jira solves this problem for you and how to track a Jira project that uses time estimates in an effective way. Great Gadgets is an app (add-on) for Jira (Server, Data Center and Cloud) that offers a set of useful gadgets for tracking Jira projects; it includes the necessary burndown / burnup charts and velocity charts that you need for tracking sprints or entire releases by time estimates.

Two Time Tracking Strategies

First of all, let’s make it clear what the time tracking fields of the Jira issues are.

Original Estimate – represents the total time estimate of the Jira issue. It is usually set at the issue creation or right after, but can be adjusted later, during the project.

Time Spent – is the total work logged on the Jira issue. This field is actually the sum of the time spent of all the work log entries of the Jira issue. The value of this field increases each time someone logs the work on the Jira issue.

Remaining Time – represents the estimated remaining work of the Jira issue. When Original Estimate field is set for the first time, Jira sets automatically the Remaining Time to the same value as of Original Estimate. Then, when someone logs the Time Spent, the Remaining Time adjusts accordingly or it is manually overwritten by the person who adds the work log entry.

Great Gadgets offers two strategies/options for tracking the Jira projects that use time estimates. It depends on you which one to choose:

Tracking by Original Time Estimate. This option uses only the Original Estimate field of the Jira issues; it does not consider Remaining Time and Time Spent. When using this option, the Current Scope of the project (total estimated work) is calculated as the sum of the Original Estimate field of all the issues from the Jira project or sprint. Burned (or completed work) is the sum of the Original Estimate field of the issues that are “done”. Remaining (or remaining work) is Current Scope minus Burned. This option is based on the principle that “done means done” – the work is considered completed (and it is counted to Burned) when the issue is marked as done, no matter if time was spent on it. It is similar with the tracking by Story Points, the only difference being the fact it uses the Original Estimate field instead of Story Points.
Tracking by Remaining Time & Time Spent. This option uses Remaining Time and Time Spent of the issues; it does not consider the Original Estimate field. When using this option, the Current Scope of the project (total estimated work) is calculated as the sum of the Time Spent field plus the sum of Remaining Time of all the issues from the Jira project or sprint. Burned (or completed work) is calculated as the sum of the Time Spent field of all the issues plus the sum of the Remaining Time field of the issues that are “done”. Remaining (or remaining work) is Current Scope minus Burned.

Once you decided what tracking method to use and you installed Great Gadgets in your Jira instance, follow the steps below to display the necessary charts on your Jira dashboard.

Sprint Burndown Burnup Chart by Time Estimates

This chart helps you determine the team’s progress during the sprint.

Add the Sprint Burnup Burndown Chart gadget to your Jira dashboard.

Start configuring the gadget by selecting your Scrum Board and the Sprint that you want to track.

At Calculate by select Original Time Estimate or Time Remaining & Time Spent, depending on which of the two tracking methods described above you want to use.
Check Count also the sub-tasks and their estimate if you want to include the sub-tasks in the calculation.
Choose also what series (lines) to display in the chart. For burndown, select Ideal Burndown and Remaining. For burnup, select Ideal Burnup and Burned.
Save the changes. The chart will be displayed on your dashboard.

If you checked Show data table, the gadget will display a Data tab with a nice sprint report that you can easily export in CSV format.

Release Burndown Burnup Chart by Time Estimates

This chart helps you determine the progress at the project level. You can also generate the chart cross-teams or cross-projects (see Cross-project release burndown chart in Jira with Great Gadgets app for more details).

Create an issue filter in Jira that includes all the issues that are in the release that you want to track. If you want to also track the sub-tasks of the issues, ensure that the filter returns the sub-tasks. Share this filter with the project users.
Add the Release Burnup Burndown Chart gadget to your Jira dashboard.

Start configuring the gadget by selecting the filter and specifying the Start Date and the End Date of the release.

At Calculate by select Original Time Estimate or Time Remaining & Time Spent, depending on which of the two tracking methods described above you want to use.
Check Count also the sub-tasks and their estimate if you want to include the sub-tasks in the calculation.
Choose also what series (lines) to display in the chart. For burndown, select Ideal Burndown and Remaining. For burnup, select Ideal Burnup and Burned.
Optionally, you can choose to display forecast for having a prediction over the ETA of your release.
Save the changes. The chart will be displayed on your dashboard.

Team Velocity Chart by Time Estimates

The team’s velocity is an essential metric that helps the Agile teams not to over-commit during sprint planning meeting, but also helps them to see how they perform from a sprint to another.

Add the Team Velocity Gadget Chart gadget to your Jira dashboard.

Start configuring the gadget by selecting your Scrum Board and the number of past sprints to be displayed and used for calculating the average velocity.

At Calculate by select Original Time Estimate or Time Remaining & Time Spent, depending on which of the two tracking methods described above you want to use.
Check Count also the sub-tasks and their estimate if you want to include the sub-tasks in the calculation.
Choose also what series (bars) to display in the chart.
Save the changes. The chart will be displayed on your dashboard.

If you checked Show data table, the gadget will display a Data tab with more details that you can easily export in CSV format.

That’s it. If you have further questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us at support@stonikbyte.com.

About StonikByte

StonikByte is an Atlassian Gold Marketplace Partner and the author of various apps (add-ons) for Atlassian Jira, which includes:

Great Gadgets for Jira – a gadgets pack for tracking projects in an agile manner. Includes gadgets like sprint and release burndown / burnup charts, team velocity, issue field sum-up, cycle time, work breakdown structure (WBS) and more.
Documents for Jira – a document management system for Jira where you can store and manage your project-related files.
Project Team for Jira – an app that makes visible the project teams, allows extending the user profiles by adding custom fields, generates and displays org-charts.

To find more about StonikByte, please visit https://stonikbyte.com/.

10 “must-have” gadgets for any Kanban dashboard in Jira

Kanban is a popular agile framework suitable for both operations and development teams. It does not matter if you are a support team handling issues reported by customers, an internal service desk team or a company that delivers pizza, Kanban helps you visualize both the process (the workflow) and the actual work passing through that process. Also, it helps you identify potential bottlenecks in your process and fix them so work can flow through it cost-effectively at an optimal speed or throughput.

A Kanban team that uses Atlassian Jira for tracking the Kanban project should also have a team dashboard for tracking their project and work. The dashboards in Jira are very powerful. They are fully configurable and you have a lot of gadgets to choose from (some of them are Jira native gadgets while some others can be added by installing Jira apps / plug-ins). So you can build the dashboard based on your needs and you will have all the metrics & charts centralized in on place. Then, you could share it with your team members or to use it as an “information radiator” by displaying it on big monitors or TV screens in the open space.

In this post we present a list of “must-have” gadgets that can be used to build a powerful dashboard in Jira for tracking a Kanban project in an effective way.

Team Wallboard Gadget – displays the Kanban task board of the team showing the current status of the issues and their current assignee. The WIP limits set on the board columns are also displayed and considered.

This gadget is offered by Great Gadgets app for Jira. It uses colored cards to display the issue based on their hierarchy: green for stories and tasks, yellow for sub-tasks and purple for epics.

Cumulative Flow Diagram – Displays the cumulative flow diagram (CFD) for the issues in an agile board or filter. It is a stacked area chart that shows the number of tasks in each column of the board or in each status category along the time. When you view the data for a particular day, you will know how many work items were present in each column at the end of that day.

The cumulative flow diagram (CFD) is one of the most advanced analytics in agile project management. Use this gadget to determine how stable your flow is and to understand where you need to focus on making your process more predictable. It gives you quantitative and qualitative insight into past and existing problems.

Such a chart is offered by Great Gadgets app for Jira.

Reported vs Done Chart – Shows the line chart of reported issues and done issues along the time. This chart tells you how your team handles the workload in time. It gives you a clear indication if your team manages to resolve issues fast enough for maintaining the backlog size in acceptable limits.

It can reveal potential team capacity problems, overloading periods or poor team performance that might require corrective actions.

Such a chart is offered by Great Gadgets app for Jira. You can generate the chart not only by Issue Count but also by sum of Story Points, Original Time Estimate or by any other numerical custom field defined in your Jira instance. This is useful if the issues in your backlog do not have the same size / weight. For more details, see also A powerful Reported vs Done chart for Jira dashboards.

Control Chart Gadget – shows the issues done in a specified time period along with their cycle time in a scatter plot chart. You can use this gadget to identify the issues that took longer than expected – the ones that are over the average time or over the threshold that you set. Simply hovering the mouse over a point from the chart will display a tool-tip with the issue key, cycle time and the date when its cycle was finished.

The rolling average line indicates the trend, while the standard deviation helps you identify the outlier issues.

It can also display a data tab, with more details about each issue. Also, it can be configured to generate the chart based on cycle time, lead time or time between two statuses. This gadget is offered by Great Gadgets app for Jira.

WIP Aging Chart Gadget – shows the “in-progress” issues from an agile board or filter along with their age (time in status or time in board column) in scatter-plot chart.

You can use this gadget to easily identify the issues that stay longer than expected in workflow status. Simply hovering the mouse over an issue from the chart will display a tool-tip with the issue key and its age.

It can also display a Data tab with the issues and their time spent (age) in their current status or board column. This gadget is offered by Great Gadgets app for Jira.

Cycle Time Trend – calculates and displays the average “Cycle Time” or “Lead Time” for the past time intervals. Use this gadget to see how fast your team delivers in time, how quickly the issues are marked as done along the time.

Cycle Time Histogram – calculates the average “Cycle Time” or “Lead Time” of the issue from a filter or Kanban board and displays the distribution of the values as a series of bars. It helps you determine how the team performs along the time, how many issues had their process time in acceptable ranges and how many did not.

It can be configured to display the average value, a custom threshold or percentiles. This chart is offered by Great Gadgets app for Jira.

Kanban Velocity / Throughput – calculates and displays the team’s velocity (throughput) for past time intervals and the average in term of number of issues (cards) delivered in a given period of time. It helps you determine how the team performs along the time.

Optionally, this gadget can also do a prediction over the ETA of the issues from the backlog, which helps you answer the difficult customer’s question: “When will my problem be fixed?”

This chart is offered by Great Gadgets app for Jira. For more details, see also How to track the team velocity / throughput in Kanban with Great Gadgets app for Jira.

Issue Formula Gadget – shows the result of a math formula (like COUNT, SUM, AVERAGE, MAX, etc) applied against the field of the issues from specified filter. It helps you calculate and display key-numbers like total unresolved critical issues or backlog size.

This gadget is offered by Great Gadgets app for Jira.

Advanced Issue Formula Gadget – allows displaying up to 6 numbers calculated based on simple or more complex math formulas applied against the fields or count of the issues from multiple Jira filters. You can use this gadgets to display project key-numbers like percentage of work done or issue reopening ratio.

This gadget is offered by Great Gadgets app for Jira.

Conclusion

The Great Gadgets app offers all you need to build an effective and powerful dashboard for tracking your Kanban project in a effective way. The app is available on Atlassian Marketplace for Jira Cloud, Server and Data Center, as well as for Confluence Cloud.

All the gadgets offered by this app are wallboard-mode compatible, which means that you can display them on big TV screens in hallways and open space.

Start building your Kanban dashboard now. If you need any assistance with Great Gadgets, please don’t hesitate to contact us at support@stonikbyte.com.

About StonikByte

StonikByte is an Atlassian Gold Marketplace Partner and the author of various apps (add-ons) for Atlassian Jira, which includes:

Great Gadgets for Jira – a gadgets pack for tracking projects in an agile manner. Includes gadgets like sprint and release burndown / burnup charts, team velocity, issue field sum-up, cycle time, work breakdown structure (WBS) and more.
Documents for Jira – a document management system for Jira where you can store and manage your project-related files.
Project Team for Jira – an app that makes visible the project teams, allows extending the user profiles by adding custom fields, generates and displays org-charts.

To find more about StonikByte, please visit https://stonikbyte.com/.

7 gadgets for a powerful Scrum dashboard in Jira

Scrum is one of the most popular agile frameworks for software development. Tracking a Scrum project in an effective way is an important task of every Scrum Master or Product Owner. Identifying and then making visible the right metrics needed not only by the team but also by management or other project shareholders can be difficult. In this post we present a list of gadgets that can be used to build a powerful dashboard in Jira for showing the essential metrics, numbers and charts for an ongoing Scrum project.

But why putting all these on a dashboard and not using Jira reports, for instance? Well, dashboards in Jira are very powerful. They are fully configurable and you have a lot of gadgets to choose from (some of them are Jira native gadgets while some others can be added by installing Jira apps/plug-ins). So you can build the dashboard based on your needs and you will have all the metrics & charts centralized in on place. Then, you could share it with your team members or to use it as an “information radiator” by displaying it on big monitors or TV screens in the open space.

Let’s see what these awesome gadgets are.

Team Wallboard Gadget – Displays the team task board. On this gadget you can see the items from the current sprint along with their status and assignee. It gives you the overall picture of the sprint contents.

It’s useful to look at this gadget during your daily Scrum and to point to the specific items during the meeting.

It is a gadget offered by Great Gadgets app for Jira. It uses colored cards to display the issue based on their hierarchy: green for stories and tasks, yellow for sub-tasks and purple for epics.

Sprint Health Gadget – Shows the overall status of the sprint. How much work was done, time elapsed and sprint scope change.

It can be also configured to display the members of the Scrum team. This is a Jira native gadget.

Sprint Burndown / BurnUp Chart Gadget – displays the burndown or burnup chart for your current sprint, which helps you see if the sprint is on track or not.

This gadget is offered by Great Gadgets app for Jira. You can configure it as burndown and/or burnup and you can also choose to display the Scope line. In addition, the chart can be generated by Story Points, Original Time Estimate, Time Remaining & Time Spent, Issue Count or by any other numerical custom field and, optionally, you can choose to include the sub-tasks in the calculation.

Release Burndown / BurnUp Chart Gadget with Forecast & Milestones – displays the burndown or burnup chart for the entire release, which helps you to see if the project is on track or not. In addition, it can do a prediction (forecast) about the release ETA based on the current or expected team velocity. Optionally, you can choose to display the milestones of the release, like for example at 25%, 50%, 75% of the release timeframe. A past milestone will be displayed in red color, if the Remaining work at that time was higher than Ideal or in green color if it was lower, thus indicating if the milestone was reached or not.

This gadget is based on a Jira issue filter, which means that you can fully control what issues to be tracked in the chart. You can use this gadget to display cross-team or cross-projects burndown/burnup charts.

Team Velocity Gadget – Shows how the team performs along the time, from a sprint to another. How much work was committed, how much was completed and the average velocity. The team needs to know its current velocity when doing to planning and the commitment for the next sprints. Also, the gadget helps you determine if the team tends to over-commit.

This gadget is offered by Great Gadgets app for Jira. It can be configured to calculate the velocity by Story Points, Original Time Estimate, Issue Count or by any other numerical custom field. It allows including sub-tasks in the calculation.

Issue Formula Gadget – shows the result of a math formula (like COUNT, SUM, AVERAGE, MAX, etc) applied against the field of the issues from specified filter. For example, you can display the number of not estimated backlog items, or the sum remaining story points.

This gadget is offered by Great Gadgets app for Jira.

Work Break-down Structure (WBS) – this gadget displays the issues from a filter in a hierarchical form of Epics > Stories > Sub-Tasks along with their current status. You can use this gadget to have an overview over specific epics or over the entire project and to quickly determine what items are still open. It can also displays the initiatives defined in Advanced Roadmaps for Jira (formerly Portfolio) on top of the epics.

This gadget is offered by Great Gadgets app for Jira.

Start building your dashboard now. If you need any assistance with Great Gadgets, please don’t hesitate to contact us at support@stonikbyte.com.

About StonikByte

StonikByte is an Atlassian Gold Marketplace Partner and the author of various apps (add-ons) for Atlassian Jira, which includes:

Great Gadgets for Jira – a gadgets pack for tracking projects in an agile manner. Includes gadgets like sprint and release burndown / burnup charts, team velocity, issue field sum-up, cycle time, work breakdown structure (WBS) and more.
Documents for Jira – a document management system for Jira where you can store and manage your project-related files.
Project Team for Jira – an app that makes visible the project teams, allows extending the user profiles by adding custom fields, generates and displays org-charts.

To find more about StonikByte, please visit https://stonikbyte.com/.

A powerful Reported vs Done chart for Jira dashboards

A Reported vs Done chart tells you how your team handles the workload in time. It gives you a clear indication if your team manages to resolve issues fast enough for maintaining the backlog size in acceptable limits.

Such chart is a “must have” on the monitoring dashboard of any support team because it shows potential team capacity problems, overloading periods or poor team performance that might require corrective actions. Don’t have it yet? See below how to add it to your Jira dashboard.

Great Gadgets app for Jira offers a gadget that you can use to display a Reported vs Done (or Reported vs Resolved) chart on your Jira dashboard. And it is a powerful gadget because it has some key-features:

The chart is based on a Jira issue filter, which means that you have full flexibility about what issues to track in the chart
You can generate the chart not only by Issue Count but also by sum of Story Points, Original Time Estimate or by any other numerical custom field defined in your Jira instance. This is useful if the issues in your backlog do not have the same size / weight.
The gadget settings allow you to select a time interval and the chart lines do not start from zero but from the actual values at the beginning of the interval

Assuming that you already have Atlassian Jira in-place, follow these steps to configure and display the chart on your Jira dashboard:

Make sure that you have the latest version of Great Gadgets installed in your Jira instance. If not, you can install the app from Atlassian Marketplace: https://marketplace.atlassian.com/search?query=stonikbyte+great+gadgets
Create a new filter in Jira (or use an existing one) that includes the Jira issues that you want to track. It must include the resolved issues.
Decide on which Jira dashboard you want to add the chart. Create a new Jira dashboard or choose an existing one.
Add the Release Burndown/Burnup Chart gadget (yes, the name Release Burndown/Burnup Chart is correct) to your Jira dashboard by clicking the Add Gadget button from your Jira dashboard and then by selecting and adding the Release Burndown/Burnup Chart.
Configure the gadget. At Release Issue Filter, enter the filter that you created before. As you can see, the Intervals of length is configurable and you can choose to calculate by Story Points, Issue Count, Original Time Estimate or by any other numerical custom field defined in your Jira instance.
At series to display, choose to display only Burned and Current Scope.
Make sure to check the option Continue to display data after release end date

That’s all! Click Save. The gadget should now display the Reported vs Done chart on your Jira dashboard.

If you have further questions, don’t hesitate to contact support@stonikbyte.com.

About StonikByte

StonikByte is an Atlassian Gold Marketplace Partner and the author of various apps (add-ons) for Atlassian Jira, which includes:

Great Gadgets for Jira – a gadgets pack for tracking projects in an agile manner. Includes gadgets like sprint and release burndown / burnup charts, team velocity, issue field sum-up, cycle time, work breakdown structure (WBS) and more.
Documents for Jira – a document management system for Jira where you can store and manage your project-related files.
Project Team for Jira – an app that makes visible the project teams, allows extending the user profiles by adding custom fields, generates and displays org-charts.

To find more about StonikByte, please visit https://stonikbyte.com/.

Cross-teams release burndown chart in Jira with Great Gadgets app

Do you have a large release that spreads across multiple projects or multiple teams and you don’t have a good way for tracking it and for making a picture about the overall progress?

With Great Gadgets app for Jira you can solve this quickly. This app offers a Release Burndown/Burnup Chart dashboard gadget that you can use to generate a cross-project or cross-team release burndown/burnup in a few steps. The gadget uses the issues from a specified Jira filter as project scope and allows you to specify the release start / end dates. You can choose to display the chart by story points, issue count, original time estimate or by any other numerical custom field defined in your Jira instance and you can also include the issue sub-tasks in the calculation. Optionally, you can choose to display a forecast line that predicts the release ETA.

Assuming that you already have Atlassian Jira in-place, follow these steps to configure and display the Release Burnup Burndown Chart gadget:

Make sure that you have the latest version of Great Gadgets installed in your Jira instance. If not, you can install the app from Atlassian Marketplace.
Create a new filter in Jira (or use an existing one) that includes the Jira issues (tasks, stories, defects, etc) from all the projects/teams that you want to track. Make sure to include the sub-tasks in this filter if you want the gadget to also consider the sub-tasks. Share this filter with your project members or the people that are going to visualize the chart.
Decide on which Jira dashboard you want to add the Release Burnup Burndown Chart gadget. Create a new Jira dashboard or choose an existing one.
Add the Release Burnup Burndown Chart gadget to your Jira dashboard.
Configure the gadget. At Release Issue Filter, enter the filter that you created before. As you can see, the Intervals of length is configurable and you can choose to calculate by Story Points, Issue Count, Original Time Estimate or by any other numerical custom field.
Select which series (lines) to be displayed in the chart.
In case you selected a forecast line, select the velocity calculation method at Forecast based on.

That’s all! Click Save. The gadget now displays the cross-projects or cross-teams burndown/burnup chart on your Jira Dashboard.

If you have further questions or suggestions, don’t hesitate to contact support@stonikbyte.com.

About StonikByte

StonikByte is an Atlassian Gold Marketplace Partner and the author of various apps (add-ons) for Atlassian Jira, which includes:

Great Gadgets for Jira – a gadgets pack for tracking projects in an agile manner. Includes gadgets like sprint and release burndown / burnup charts, team velocity, issue field sum-up, cycle time, work breakdown structure (WBS) and more.
Documents for Jira – a document management system for Jira where you can store and manage your project-related files.
Project Team for Jira – an app that makes visible the project teams, allows extending the user profiles by adding custom fields, generates and displays org-charts.

To find more about StonikByte, please visit https://stonikbyte.com/.

How to track the team velocity / throughput in Kanban with Great Gadgets app for Jira

“Tracking team velocity in Kanban” might sound strange for some people as velocity is something specific to the Scrum framework and this term is not part of Kanban “by-the-book”. But even in Kanban, especially when switching from Scrum to Kanban, the question “How much business value my team delivers in time?” is still applicable. In Kanban the velocity is actually called “throughput”. As agile project manager or team member you want to see the amount of work done/delivered by your team in time, to see how the team performs or to make a better picture about the team’s capacity that helps you to estimate further releases.

In Kanban you don’t have time-boxed sprints, but you can measure the velocity / throughput on a per-week or per-month basis, by issues (cards) done or story-points burned. For example, “done issues per week” or “burned story-points per month”.

The Great Gadgets app for Atlassian Jira offers all you need to easily determine your team velocity. This app includes a Kanban Velocity gadget that helps you calculate and display a velocity chart on a Jira dashboard in a minute.

Assuming that you already have Atlassian Jira in-place, follow these steps to configure and display the Kanban Velocity gadget:

Make sure that you have the latest version of Great Gadgets installed in your Jira instance. If not, you can install the app from Atlassian Marketplace: https://marketplace.atlassian.com/search?query=stonikbyte+great+gadgets
Create a new filter in Jira (or use an existing one) that includes the Jira issues (tasks, stories, defects, etc) from your project. Make sure to include the sub-tasks in this filter if you want the velocity calculation to also consider the sub-tasks. Share this filter with your project members or the people that are going to visualize the velocity chart.
Decide on which Jira dashboard you want to add the Kanban Velocity gadget. Create a new Jira dashboard or choose an existing one.
Add the Kanban Velocity gadget to your Jira dashboard by clicking the Add Gadget button from your dashboard and then by selecting and adding the Kanban Velocity Gadget.

Configure the gadget. Even if most of the settings are preconfigured, review and adjust them based on your needs. At Data, enter the filter that you created before or pick an existing Kanban board (the board’s filter will be used in this case). As you can see, the Interval length is configurable and you can choose to calculate the velocity by Issue Count, Story Points, Original Time Estimate or by any numerical custom field defined in your Jira instance. Optionally, you can choose to count also the sub-tasks and their estimate in the velocity calculation.

That’s all! Click Save. The gadget should now display the velocity chart for your Kanban team.

Bonus features!

If you check “Show data table” in the gadget settings, it will display a Data tab with a nice velocity / throughput report that you can easily export in CSV format.
If you check “Show backlog forecast”, the gadget will display a Backlog tab your backlog items along with their ETA calculated automatically based on the current velocity. This could help you answer the difficult customer’s question “When will my problem be solved?“.

If you have further questions, don’t hesitate to contact support@stonikbyte.com.

About StonikByte

StonikByte is an Atlassian Gold Marketplace Partner and the author of various apps (add-ons) for Atlassian Jira, which includes:

Great Gadgets for Jira – a gadgets pack for tracking projects in an agile manner. Includes gadgets like sprint and release burndown / burnup charts, team velocity, issue field sum-up, cycle time, work breakdown structure (WBS) and more.
Documents for Jira – a document management system for Jira where you can store and manage your project-related files.
Project Team for Jira – an app that makes visible the project teams, allows extending the user profiles by adding custom fields, generates and displays org-charts.

To find more about StonikByte, please visit https://stonikbyte.com/.