🪞Do your Jira dashboards need a glow up?

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In our last article, we discussed all the cool Confluence macros you can add to your pages to zhoosh them up. Well, I didn’t want Jira to get jealous, so let’s add some pizzazz to your Jira dashboards as well! And, if you don’t have any dashboards yet, that’s OK. Now you’ll be a pro when you build your first one!

The Default Dashboard

Did you know that Jira has a default dashboard? Well, it does, and here’s how it works:

The Jira default dashboard is the initial dashboard that all Jira users see when they log in for the first time, or if they haven't set a personal favorite dashboard. It is a generic, user-centric dashboard managed by Jira administrators and is designed to highlight the work items and information most relevant to each user.

Key Features:

• Universal Access: All users can see the default dashboard unless they set a different one as their favorite.
• Admin Configurable: Jira admins can customize the layout, add or remove gadgets (information widgets), and configure what information is displayed. Changes made by admins affect all users who are still using the default dashboard.
• Personalization: Users can replace their Jira home page with the default dashboard for a more personalized experience.

So, if you want to create a shared dashboard across your teams, this is an easy way to do it! It’s NOT the only way, though. Jira makes it very easy to share any dashboard. Please see: Create and edit dashboards.

What things should you add to this nifty default dashboard? I’m SO glad you asked, because I have some thoughts:

Jira New User Dashboard

One option is to make this a dashboard for new Jira users. Your experienced Jira users can probably make their own dashboards, so let’s help the folks who are just learning Jira. Here’s some of my favorite dashboard gadgets for new Jira users, in no particular order:

Introduction

This puts the Jira product guide and free online training front and center. You can also customize the text here in case you want to reference any internal training options you’ve built to help new team members learn your Jira site, specifically.

Assigned to Me

This gadget will show all Jira work items assigned to the current user. This makes it very easy to see all your work at a glance. You can also choose what columns are displayed in this gadget (the above shows the work item type, key, summary, and priority. You might want to add due date or any other fields you’d like.)

Watched Issues

Watched issues is similar to Assigned to me, above. This gadget will show everything that you have watched by clicking on the eye on any work item:

You can choose what columns are displayed on this gadget as well. 🙂

Starred filters

This is another gadget that is customized for each user, showing you just the filters you’ve starred. The number in the right column shows the number of work items returned by that filter. Encourage your users to star the filters they use frequently so they’re easy to find again! They can do that from the list of filters:

Wallboard Spacer Gadget

This one is just for aesthetics, but it can provide a nice divider between gadgets and sections on your dashboard. Hey, this is a make-over, right? 😉

Reporting Dashboards

Another option is a dashboard that reports on your project/s health. If you’re using sprints, there are gadgets for sprint health and status, as well as gadgets that can be configured to show custom metrics for both business and software teams:

Sprint Health Gadget

For Scrum teams, this is a great gadget to provide an overview of your current sprint. It will auto-update, so when you close a sprint and open the next, the gadget adjusts accordingly. You could create a dashboard of sprint health gadgets for multiple projects and keep an eye on all of your sprints from a single dashboard.

Sprint Burndown Gadget

If you’re doing Scrum, well, then I don’t need to tell you about burndown charts; they are the quintessential Scrum reporting tool! Like the sprint health gadget, it will adjust to show the current sprint. These two gadgets definitely pair well together!

Days Remaining in Sprint Gadget

This is a small gadget that shows the number of days remaining in the current sprint. This number is also on the sprint health gadget, but this is much easier to read in a dashboard with a narrow column. (See dashboard layouts further down in this article for more on layouts.)

Filter counts

This uses a custom filter to show, well, whatever you want! This gadget will display the total number of work items that fit whatever criteria you want to give it. Here is the settings I used for the above gadget:

I chose one project and one field (priority = critical) but I could have added other criteria if I wanted. This can be a very useful gadget to pull any custom metric based on your Jira fields.

Filter Results

Filter Results will show all work items returned by a Jira filter. You can use JQL (Jira Query Language) to create a filter based on whatever criteria matters to you, then display the results in this gadget. You can also customize what fields are displayed in the gadget.

Issue Statistics

The Issue Statistics gadget lets you choose any Jira project or filter and one field. The gadget will then report on the values for that field within the project/filter you chose. If you want to report against multiple projects, you can use this filter:

project in ("project 1", "project 2", etc.)

The above example uses just my SYS project and gives me the total number of work items for each person in the project (by choosing assignee as my field), along with the percentage.

Two-Dimensional Filter Statistics

This one is similar to the issue statistics gadget; you just get to choose one filter and two fields, and the gadget will give you a table back. For the above example, I had a filter for all work in my SYS project, and then I chose Assignee and Status as my two fields. This lets me see work assigned to each user AND the workflow status of that work.

Dashboard layouts

You have the following layout options for your Jira dashboards, via the Change layout option in the upper right corner of your dashboard, when in edit mode:

These options are, from left to right:

• One wide column
• Two same-sized columns
• Three same-sized columns
• Two columns, left is narrow and right is a wide column
• Two columns, left is wide and right is a narrow column

Ready to go forth and dash your way to project bliss?

OK, yeah, that was pretty corny, even for me! All really bad humor aside, I do hope this article has given you some ideas for how to create Jira dashboards for whatever data and metrics matter to you. Please post in the comments if you have any reports or metrics you’re struggling to add to your Jira dashboards. Or if you know of a great Jira gadget that I didn't include here, please share that too!

Resources to learn more:

• Learn about Jira reports & dashboards

• Configure the default dashboard

• All Jira Dashboard gadgets

• Track and improve metrics for your software project (online free course!)