Are Epics included in the calculations for the Control Chart?

Question

In JIRA onDemand, we use an Agile Board for controlling sprints. I'd like to use more of the out of the box reporting included in Jira, in particular the Control Chart.

The following page refers to "issues" but not specifically to Epics vs Stories:

https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/AGILE/Viewing+the+Control+Chart

It says that all issues in the "in progress" stage are used for calculation. Does that include the epics, or only the stories?

In an Agile board, the epics are NOT visibile, and only the stories included in the sprint are transitioned.

However, the epics also have a status, which we use as well to indicate their status (at the moment, epics and stories share the same workflow). And to make all of that more complicated, the epics have their special Epic Status which doesn't get updated automatically when the epic is transitioned but I think that's beside the point. However we do modify this Epic Status to only show active epics in the Plan tab of the board.

Maybe it's too much details, but basically I want to understand what the control chart represents, because right now it's not clear to me and if it includes the epics then it's not good because it doesn't represent the work we do.

thank you for your help

Roman Verevkin · Answer

Hi Roland,

I've found the way to except Epics and Stories from the calculation in Control Chart.

For doing it you need to:

1. Create a new quick-filter on the board settings:

project = PROJECT_NAME AND issuetype in (Bug, Improvement, Issue, Sub-task, Task)

2. Select created filter in Control Chart:

Roland Flutet · Answer

Hi Clarissa,

thank you for your answer

I actually already had checked out both links;the first link, unfortunately, does not apply to the Cloud version of JIRA (you may notice my comment from last week at the bottom of that very page).

Having said that, I read the second link again, and while it doesn't quite give a direct answer to my question (are both epics and stories shown in the control chart), it suggests that there is a way to filter what the graph shows to only consider epics or stories.

It's not quite clear yet but I will look into this a bit further, thank you again for your feedback

cheers,

roland

cgauterio · Answer

Hi Roland,

I suggest you take a look at the following KB article: How To Track Epics in the Control Chart

In this link, there's also a link to a blog that is really helpful: Visualizing Epics and Dependencies in JIRA

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Clarissa.