Kanban Velocity Gadget not showing work for current period

[David Leal]

We are using Kanban Velocity Gadget for our Kanban project. We use as initial start date 4/28/2021 (MM/DD/YYYY format) of our iteration. The project started in 2020, during 2021 the project was on hold for two months and we resumed it on 4/28/2021. I would like to calculate the team velocity using the last three intervals (as a reference for future iterations), but the gadget doesn't show the current work we have done from 4/28/2021 until now. I was playing with some of the configuration parameters, but I am not able to find out why it doesn't show the work for the current interval.

Here is the configuration of the gadget:

as you can see here, the Burndown chart is showing the progress we have made so far:

When I export from the gadget (Data) all the work counted, here is the information:

so as you can see the period the project was on hold, but I would expect it considers the interval from 04/28/2021 until today. By the way, it is not clear why the interval is split this way because the initial start date is 4/28/2021 so I would expect the previous interval would be from 4/13/2021 to 4/27/2021, but it shows: from 4/13/2021 to 04/26/2021.

Is there any documentation about the specifications of this gadget, to understand how it works. The following links only provides description for each parameters, but not how it works under specific scenarios. 

https://bitbucket.org/StonikByte/great-gadgets-add-on/wiki/Home#!kanban-velocity-gadget

Thanks for any help,

David

[Danut M _StonikByte_ · Accepted solution]

Hi David,

The gadget displays only the past & completed time intervals that have the length specified at "Intervals of". The intervals are aligned to "Interval start date" - as mentioned it its description, this setting is just used for aligning the time intervals( by their start date).

In your example, you have Interval Start Date = 28/04/21 and Intervals of 2 weeks. 

Because the gadget displays only the past completed 6 intervals, the last interval in the chart is [04/14/21 - 04/27/21] (aligned to 28/04/21), the previous is [03/31/21 - 04/13/21] and so on..., which is correct.

It does not display the data after 04/27/21, because the next 2-weeks long interval would be [04/28/21 - 05/11/21] is not completed yet! Today, when you visualize the chart, is 05/08/21... So the next interval will appear on 05/12/21, when it becomes completed. 

Does it make sense now?

If you want to have recent data, re-align the intervals by changing Interval Start Date to date of today.

Indeed, it seems to be an issue in data tab, the dates from the report being displayed shifted with 1 day. We will investigate and correct this. 

Danut.

[David Leal]

@Danut M _StonikByte_ thanks for your response. The word "completed" doesn't appear in the documentation I referred in my question to this specific gadget, so it is an underlying assumption. The workaround to show changing the initial date (changing every day the initial date to see the current progress), then miss-represents my real iteration periods starting from 4/28/2021.

As you can see from the graph now the iterations interval doesn't represent my real intervals: 

• Current: 4/28/2021-5/11/2021
• Previous: 4/14/2021-4/27/2021

I have two weeks intervals, starting on Wednesdays and ending on Tuesdays.

My iteration ends on 5/11/2021 if I want to have the retrospective meeting the same day the iteration ends, it doesn't show any result for the current iteration. Then I am forced to have the retro the next day once the iteration ended, to show the completed interval. In the same way during the current iteration, I can not use this gadget to show the current progress to my team, because it will be zero always. 

As a user I don't see the advantage of having this "completed interval constraint", it makes the gadget less useful and inconsistent with the Burndown Chart gadget I showed, it shows progress, but Kanban Velocity Gadget will indicate no points burnt.

I would suggest adding a parameter to the gadget to allow compute the velocity for the last un-completed interval and let the user (owner of the dashboard) decide how to use it. Another issue with the current gadget approach is that only the configuration option is available for the owner of the dashboard, so any other user of my dashboard cannot change the initial date parameter. Having a parameter that computes the velocity for an uncompleted interval and just to warn the user that the current iteration has not ended so in order to have a more accurate velocity better to wait after the iteration ends, is a good solution extending the existing functionality without providing inconsistency result with the current behavior.

I am glad the way the data is showing there is a bug and not I am doing something wrong.

Please let me know if you plan to consider fixing the data issue and also to consider this improvement otherwise I can export the data into an excel file and create a similar graph representing the current progress.

I would also suggest improving the documentation to add more clarity about how the average velocity is computed, so we can double-check the result. 

Thanks,

David

[Danut M _StonikByte_]

Hi David,

We agree with your suggestion of adding an optional parameter for displaying the numbers of the current time interval. We plan to implement it in one of the next versions.

I added a request in our public issue tracker that you can follow here: 

https://bitbucket.org/StonikByte/great-gadgets-add-on/issues/102 

Danut.