📣 Agile Reports & Gadgets expands with Cumulative Flow, Monte Carlo & Throughput Charts 🚀

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Every agile team eventually hits the same wall: you have metrics, but not a system. You can see velocity, but not flow. You can measure output, but not predictability. Individual charts answer individual questions - but they rarely tell the full story.

That's exactly what Broken Build set out to fix with Agile Reports & Gadgets 8.5.

This release introduces three major new chart families - Agile Cumulative Flow Charts, Agile Monte Carlo Charts, and Agile Throughput Charts - completing a unified analytical layer that connects past behaviour, present dynamics, and future projections in one coherent environment. And it doesn't stand alone: these additions slot directly alongside the existing Agile Velocity Charts, Agile Burnup Burndown Charts, and Agile Cycle Time Chart, forming a comprehensive system for understanding delivery across multiple dimensions.

Whether you're a Scrum master tracking sprint health, a flow manager uncovering process bottlenecks, or a delivery lead forecasting a release date, this update gives you the tools to move from intuition to informed, data-driven confidence.

🔑 Key highlights at a glance

• 🌊 Cumulative Flow Charts - inspect system balance, detect bottlenecks, and track flow stability across statuses and timeframes

• 🎲 Monte Carlo Charts - answer "when will it be done?" and "how much can we deliver?" using probabilistic simulation

• ⚡ Throughput Charts - measure delivery performance at every stage, visualise trends, and build a Health Monitor RAG

• 🩺 Health Metrics - Arrival, Departure, and WIP at a glance, with custom status grouping

• 🔮 What-if scenarios - model scope changes and capacity shifts before committing to a plan

• 🧮 Alternative throughput - forecast new projects or initiatives before they've generated their own data

Ready to dig in? Here's everything that's new. 👇

What's new in Agile Reports 8.5: Cumulative Flow Charts, Monte Carlo Charts & Throughput Charts

This release is structured around three distinct - yet deeply interconnected - chart families. Each one answers a different layer of the delivery question: What is the system doing? How is it performing? What will happen next?

Together with Agile Velocity Charts, Agile Burnup Burndown Charts, and Agile Cycle Time Charts, these new additions complete a full-spectrum reporting toolkit. Let's walk through every update.

🌊 Cumulative Flow Charts

🔷 Cumulative Flow Diagram based on status categories with Arrival and Departure lines

Track how work accumulates and exits your system over time. This chart visualises work in progress across status categories, with dedicated Arrival and Departure lines that make it easy to assess flow balance and spot throughput instability at a glance.

💡 Tip: Watch the gap between Arrival and Departure lines. A widening gap signals growing WIP and potential bottlenecks - use it as an early warning system before delays become visible in velocity.

📊 Available in: Agile Reports & Gadgets, Agile Cumulative Flow Charts

🔷 Cumulative Flow Diagram based on status categories with Arrival and Departure lines

Track how work accumulates and exits your system over time. This chart visualises work in progress across status categories, with dedicated Arrival and Departure lines that make it easy to assess flow balance and spot throughput instability at a glance.

💡 Tip: Watch the gap between Arrival and Departure lines. A widening gap signals growing WIP and potential bottlenecks - use it as an early warning system before delays become visible in velocity.

📊 Available in: Agile Reports & Gadgets, Agile Cumulative Flow Charts

🔷 Cumulative Burndown Flow chart based on statuses with Initial scope and Ideal slope lines

This variant of the burndown chart overlays your Initial Scope and an Ideal Slope line across all statuses, giving you a clear reference for where delivery should be at any given point - versus where it actually is.

💡 Tip: Use the Ideal Slope as a coaching tool in retrospectives. When work consistently drifts above the ideal line, it's often a signal of mid-sprint scope creep or underestimated stories - great for structured team conversations.

📊 Available in: Agile Reports & Gadgets, Agile Cumulative Flow Charts

🔷 Cumulative Flow Diagram based on statuses with relative values

Sometimes raw numbers obscure the real story. This chart switches the view to relative percentages, showing proportional work distribution across statuses - making it far easier to spot shifts in process balance and changes in flow efficiency over time.

💡 Tip: Use relative values when comparing periods with very different team sizes or workloads. Proportional views normalise the data, making trend analysis much more reliable.

📊 Available in: Agile Reports & Gadgets, Agile Cumulative Flow Charts

🔷 Active sprint Cumulative Burndown Flow chart with Initial scope and Ideal slope lines

Purpose-built for sprint tracking, this chart monitors how work within your active sprint decreases over time. The Initial Scope and Ideal Slope overlays give Scrum teams an immediate read on whether they're on track for a clean sprint completion.

💡 Tip: Pin this chart to your team's sprint dashboard and review it at every daily stand-up. When the actual burndown diverges from the Ideal Slope early in the sprint, you still have time to re-plan or re-prioritise.

📊 Available in: Agile Reports & Gadgets, Agile Cumulative Flow Charts

🔷 Health Metrics on Cumulative Flow Charts

Sitting at the top of every Cumulative Flow Chart, the Health Metrics panel gives you an immediate process overview through three key signals:

• Arrival rate - how much work is entering the flow

• Departure rate - how much work is exiting the flow

• WIP (Work in Progress) - how much work is currently in-flight

You can fine-tune each metric by adjusting grouping settings and choosing your preferred statistics calculation method (mean, median, 85th/95th percentile, or a custom value).

💡 Tip: Set your Health Metrics calculation to the 85th percentile for a more realistic view of your team's typical performance - it naturally filters out outlier sprints without ignoring them entirely.

📊 Available in: Agile Reports & Gadgets, Agile Cumulative Flow Charts

🔷 Custom status groups

Need to highlight a specific status - or combine several statuses - into a single band on the chart? You can now create a custom status group, assign it a name and colour, and control its position relative to other bands.

📊 Available in: Agile Reports & Gadgets, Agile Cumulative Flow Charts

🎲 Monte Carlo Charts

♦️ Forecasting when the remaining work can be delivered

Stop guessing delivery dates. This Monte Carlo simulation chart runs thousands of trials based on your team's historical throughput and plots the probability distribution of when your remaining work will be complete - expressed as intervals relative to your target date. The colour-coded zones (green, yellow, red) make the confidence level immediately readable.

💡 Tip: Share this chart with stakeholders instead of a single-date estimate. Showing a probability distribution builds credibility and manages expectations far more effectively than a point-in-time commitment.

📊 Available in: Agile Reports & Gadgets, Agile Monte Carlo Charts

♦️ Forecasting how many items or story points can be delivered by a specific date

Flip the question around: instead of asking when work will be done, ask how much can be done by a specific date. This chart models the overlap between your team's delivery distribution and your deadline, giving you a data-backed answer grounded in actual past performance.

💡 Tip: Use this chart during release planning when a hard deadline is non-negotiable. It helps the team and stakeholders agree on a realistic scope before work begins - not after it runs over.

📊 Available in: Agile Reports & Gadgets, Agile Monte Carlo Charts

♦️ Forecasting story points deliverable in the next sprint

An especially useful application of Monte Carlo simulation: predict your next sprint's realistic scope based on your team's throughput over the past year or more. Instead of gut-feeling your sprint planning, let the data tell you what's achievable.

💡 Tip: Run this forecast before sprint planning sessions and use the 85th percentile result as your upper-bound commitment. It gives the team stretch without over-promising.

📊 Available in: Agile Reports & Gadgets, Agile Monte Carlo Charts

♦️ What-if scenarios for remaining work

Not every plan survives first contact with reality. The what-if remaining work feature lets you model hypothetical scope changes directly on the chart - so you can see how adjusting the backlog affects your forecasted delivery date before you make any actual changes.

💡 Tip: Use what-if scenarios in scope negotiation conversations. When a stakeholder wants to add scope, model it live and show the projected impact on the delivery date. It turns abstract pushback into a concrete, shared decision.

📊 Available in: Agile Reports & Gadgets, Agile Monte Carlo Charts

♦️ What-if scenarios for capacity allocation

Team size and allocation change - and your forecast should reflect that. The capacity allocation what-if feature lets you adjust a coefficient to model how resourcing changes (team members added, reduced, or partially allocated) ripple through your delivery projection.

💡 Tip: Use this before headcount decisions are finalised. Modelling the difference between 80% and 100% capacity allocation on a timeline can make resource conversations far more concrete for leadership.

📊 Available in: Agile Reports & Gadgets, Agile Monte Carlo Charts

♦️ Health Metrics on Monte Carlo Charts: Completion, Remaining work, Target vs. Projection

At a glance on the dashboard, the Monte Carlo Health Metrics panel shows you three key project signals:

• Completion - what percentage of work is already done

• Remaining work - what's still in the backlog

• Target vs. Projection - whether the current trajectory puts you on track, behind, or ahead of your goal

💡 Tip: Add the Monte Carlo Health Metrics to your programme dashboard to give leadership a one-line read on delivery confidence - without them needing to interpret a full simulation chart.

📊 Available in: Agile Reports & Gadgets, Agile Monte Carlo Charts

♦️ Alternative throughput for forecasting projects before they start

New release? Brand-new initiative? No historical data yet? No problem. You can now import throughput from a similar past initiative or from the Scrum/Kanban team that will own the project - and use that as the basis for a Monte Carlo forecast, even before a single issue has been completed.

💡 Tip: When borrowing throughput from a similar past project, document your assumptions clearly. This creates an audit trail that helps teams calibrate against actuals as the new project progresses.

📊 Available in: Agile Reports & Gadgets, Agile Monte Carlo Charts

⚡ Throughput Charts

🔶 Measuring delivery throughput at every stage of the flow

Throughput isn't just about what gets shipped - it's about what happens every step of the way. The new Throughput Chart lets you configure which statuses count toward throughput measurement, so you can analyse the entire delivery flow or zoom in on any specific mid-phase stage.

💡 Tip: To measure throughput for a specific mid-stage (e.g., from code review to deployment), select the end status of that stage and all statuses downstream. This isolates exactly the part of the flow you want to optimise.

📊 Available in: Agile Reports & Gadgets, Agile Throughput Charts

🔶 Uncovering trends and predictability using averages and statistics

Statistical analysis is built right into the chart. Toggle on mean, median, 85th percentile, 95th percentile, or a custom percentile to surface how stable - or volatile - your throughput has been over time. Rolling averages and configurable percentile windows help you smooth out noise and examine genuine trends.

💡 Tip: The 85th percentile line is a reliable indicator of what your team can deliver with a high degree of confidence. If the line is drifting downward over time, it's worth investigating what structural changes are reducing throughput.

📊 Available in: Agile Reports & Gadgets, Agile Throughput Charts

🔶 Revealing where capacity is actually spent using a breakdown by any issue field

Aggregate throughput numbers can hide where effort is really going. The breakdown by issue field feature lets you segment throughput data by any work item field - including custom fields - to show exactly how capacity is being distributed across issue types, components, teams, or any other dimension your data holds.

💡 Tip: Break down throughput by issue type (Story, Bug, Task) and share the chart with stakeholders to make invisible maintenance work visible. It's one of the most persuasive ways to have a conversation about sustainable delivery.

📊 Available in: Agile Reports & Gadgets, Agile Throughput Charts

🔶 Setting target lines to build a Health Monitor RAG

Once your team has agreed on what "good" looks like, you can set target lines directly on the Throughput Chart to create a visual RAG (Red, Amber, Green) Health Monitor. The next time you open the chart, you'll know your delivery status at a glance - no data interpretation needed.

💡 Tip: Agree on RAG thresholds collaboratively with stakeholders before setting them. When everyone aligns on what Red, Amber, and Green mean in terms of throughput, the chart becomes a shared language rather than just a report.

📊 Available in: Agile Reports & Gadgets, Agile Throughput Charts

📊 Smarter delivery insights are just a click away – don't miss out

What a release 🎉

Agile Reports & Gadgets 8.5 from Broken Build is a significant leap forward for any team that wants to move beyond isolated metrics and understand delivery as the dynamic system it truly is. With the addition of Agile Cumulative Flow Charts, Agile Monte Carlo Charts, and Agile Throughput Charts, the toolkit now covers the full analytical spectrum - flow, performance, and forecasting - all working in concert with your existing Agile Velocity Charts, Agile Burnup Burndown Charts, and Agile Cycle Time Chart.

Whether you're tracking sprint health in real time 🏃, modelling delivery scenarios before a stakeholder meeting 🔮, or building a RAG Health Monitor that gives leadership instant confidence 🚦 - it's all here, and it's all powered by the same historical data you're already generating in Jira.

Ready to measure what matters?

• 📥 Install Agile Reports & Gadgets from the Atlassian Marketplace

• 🆓 Start your 30-day free trial to see the difference a structured, data-driven view of delivery makes to your team's conversations and decisions

• 💬 Contact Broken Build support for setup help, best-practice guidance, or advanced use cases

Support options:

• 📧 Email: support@brokenbuild.net

• 🔗 Customer Portal

• 📅 Book a demo

Happy dashboarding - and may your flow be stable, your throughput be consistent, and your forecasts always on track! 🚀

Cheers,
The Broken Build Team