Days in column in Scrum Board is showing wrong number

Question

I realized that I have found some stories in the active board with red points, that represents the number of days the issue is on a given column in my  board, on my case it shows 86 days. My issue was created on Jan/22/2019, therefore instead of informing the number of days the story was in a given column (status) it is reporting the number of days since the story was created.

The story turned in to BUILD COMPLETE on Apr, 2nd, 2019, but it is not showing that.

The workflow for the story is: TO DO -> IN BUILD -> BUILD COMPLETE -> IN QAT -> QAT COMPLETE or REWORK (in case of fail) -> DONE.

The left-most column of my board represents two statuses: TO DO or BUILD COMPLETE. It is a QAT Board, so stories at this board start with BUILD COMPLETE status (implementation finished). The TO DO status is for other issue types, such tasks.

If I run the query:

project = XXXX AND issuetype = Story AND status = "BUILD COMPLETE" 
    AND status changed BEFORE -15d

to identify stories in BUILD COMPLETE more than 15 days, the story appears, because it was turned into BUILD COMPLETE on 4/2/2019.

I would like to understand better how the information: days in a column works. I have several issues with the same problem. In some cases they have been participated in more than one Sprint, because three boards representing the effort of 2 development team and QAT team.

In other cases I am getting the correct number, but sometimes the information is completely wrong.

Thanks in advance,

David

Note: I don't believe days in column really represents the number of days on a given column, instead it represents the number of days on a given status.  For example if you have a story in TO DO status 20 days in the backlog, and you move it from the backlog into your active sprint that has a column: TO DO and you started the sprint a days ago, the value: days in this column is not going to show 1 day, instead it will show 20 days, so rather than showing number of days in a column it shows number of days in a given status.

Bill Sheboy · Answer

Greetings!  There appear to be a few defects on this for cloud and server, which our vendor has closed as "no repro".

After analyzing some cases where this problem occurs on one of our team's Kanban boards, I see that when an issue goes backwards in the columns (status flow), the time appears to be computed as:

"Days in Column" = (Difference from TODAY and First Date in column) - Number of days spent in other columns (sometimes...)

It is the "sometimes" part that I haven't be able to discern.

I am guessing this is deterministic, but without the source code it will be difficult to nail down the repro steps.

Charlotta Viljesjö · Answer

I have the same problem. Do you need to add another status for the items in the backlog, and then change it to "to do" when you move it to an active sprint in order to use the days in column in an correct way?

Jonathan Reis_89bsoy · Answer

The same here.