Jira Sprint Reporting: Correlating Cycle Time with Story Points

[#1]

Hey, Atlassian Community,

In this guide, we will explain how you can use Timepiece to track Cycle Time trends for different story point values across your latest sprints.

As agile teams grow, they start asking more complex questions. It's no longer enough to know if you hit your sprint goals; you need to know how efficiently you're working. Are you getting faster at completing complex tasks? Are small tasks taking longer than they should? Answering these questions requires a level of reporting that goes beyond Jira's standard toolset.

Many teams want to track metrics like Cycle Time and analyze their trends across sprints. But relying on a simple average can be misleading when tasks vary greatly in size. A 3-point task and a 21-point task don’t tell the same story. That’s why it’s more meaningful to look at the averages and trends of tasks with similar sizes. This powerful report can feel out of reach, but it doesn't have to be.

This guide will show you how to build this exact report using Timepiece - Time in Status for Jira. We'll walk through a simple, three-step process to turn your raw Jira data into actionable insights to help your team level up.

Three-Step Recipe for an Advanced Report

We'll use Timepiece's Duration Between Statuses report as our foundation. It allows us to measure time spent based on any changing field, in our case, the Sprint field.

Step 1: Focus on Your Recent Sprints

First, you need to tell the report to only look at the data you care about, for instance, your last 3 sprints. Issues can exist in Jira for months before being worked on, and that long wait time can skew your metrics.

Timepiece solves this with a feature called Trim History. It lets you set a start and end date for your report. By setting the date range to cover your target sprints, you create a clean dataset that only includes activities from that specific period, ensuring your analysis is accurate and relevant.

Step 2: Define Your "Cycle Time"  

Next, you need to define what Cycle Time means for your team. Generally, it's the time from when work begins on an issue until it's completed, excluding any time spent waiting in the backlog.  

In Timepiece, you can calculate this easily within your report. Simply use the Statuses selection panel to choose only the statuses that represent active work, like 'In Progress' or 'In Review'.

By including only these active statuses, you are telling Timepiece to calculate the total time an issue spent working towards completion, giving you an accurate Cycle Time for every issue. 

Step 3: Group by Story Points and Get the Average

At this point, you have the raw Cycle Time for every issue in your selected sprints. The final step is to make this data easy to understand. Instead of a long list of individual issues, you want to see the Average Cycle Time for all 1-point stories, 3-point stories, and so on.

In the Report Options, simply switch the report type from ‘List’ to ‘Average'. Then, use the Group By dropdown and select Story Points and Sprint. Timepiece will automatically group all issues by their story point value and calculate the Average Cycle Time for each group, within each sprint.

 

From Data to Decisions: Putting Your Report to Work

You've now built your report. The result is a clear breakdown showing you the Average Cycle Time for 1-point stories, 3-point stories, and 5-point stories across each of your last 3 sprints. You can finally answer critical questions like, "Are we getting faster at our 5-point stories?" or "Did our larger tasks take longer than usual last sprint?" 

But what if you spot an anomaly? Imagine you see that the 5-point stories took much longer last sprint. Instead of guessing why, you can investigate directly.

Timepiece has a Drill Down feature that makes every number in your report interactive. Simply click on any average value, and Timepiece will instantly show you the list of the exact Jira issues used in that calculation. This allows you to quickly spot an outlier. Perhaps an issue that was blocked for days, and understand the 'why' behind the data. It turns your report from a static overview into a dynamic investigation tool.

 

Improve Your Team Performance

Jira contains a goldmine of data, but you need the right tools to unlock its value. By combining a few of Timepiece’s flexible features, you can easily build a sophisticated report that provides deep, actionable insights into your team's performance.

Ready to see what stories are hidden in your Jira data? Find Timepiece - Time in Status for Jira on the Atlassian Marketplace.