Blocked Days per Workflow stage

Question

Hello Atlassian Community,

My team has been facing a challenge regarding how to count the days an issue was blocked per workflow stage. We have been using the Flag (impediment) to mark that our issues are blocked, but we can have blocked time in different stages (we are not a software development team so our work nature is not as "Jira friendly").

When we consult Actionable Agile, for example, on the cycle time chart we can only see the blocked time as a whole (a sum of all the days and not per stage) - even if we filter per stage, the blocked time is always the total and not the days in that stage specifically. We've tried to export data from other sources in Jira but we haven't found any report that gives us the necessary info for us to calculate it.

Is there any way to take this information from Jira?

If there's not. we'll probably have to think of a different way to mark our blocked time (we have a lot of dependencies from external teams so we must really acknowledge this in our metrics) - do you have any suggestion of how to mark blocked time, preferably in a way that we can later export the data to analyse?

Zoryana Bohutska _SaaSJet_ · Answer

Hi @Micaela Barros

I think you can try to set SLA for issues to monitor delays.

For example, you can try SLA time and report. For start condition select issue field - flag. For stop condition - any other issues field with which you marked unblocked issues.

Then you can set SLA time limits for flagged issues and set notifications if they too long blocked.

Let me know if you have any questions. I will be happy to help you.

Regards

Bill Sheboy · Answer

Hi @Micaela Barros

I am wondering about the situation you are describing... Specifically, is this a short-term issue or an on-going behavior of the team's workflow and the handling of blockers?

If this is short-term, I recommend  manually tracking the blocked time, pausing to investigate why/how things are blocked, and discussing the observations with the team; improvements could eliminate the need to measure blocking time.  This approach aligns with the idea of only measuring something when you need it to help you.

If this is an on-going issue, and you have stable workflow steps, you could build your own measures using custom fields and automation rules.  For example if you had a status called in progress:

* Add custom fields for In Progress Block Start, In Progress Block End, and In Progress Block Time
* Add an automation rule to detect flag being set, and then set the start time
* And an automation rule to detect flag clearing, and the set the end time, compute the difference, and increment the blocking time.  You can clear the start/end times at this point too, unless you want to keep the last one visible.

As you describe using the Actionable Agile add-on, I recommend reading the book that add-on is based upon to help with workflow undertanding and improvements: Actionable Agile Metrics for Predictability: An Introduction.

Best regards,

Bill

Emre Toptancı [OBSS] · Answer

Hello @Micaela Barros ,

I am afraid Jira does not have an out of the box solution for that. Your use case is a complex one and I am proud to say that we have a solution for that.

Our team at OBSS built Timepiece - Time in Status for Jira app for this exact need. It is available for Jira Server, Cloud and Data Center.

Time in Status has many report types but the one relevant ones here are Status Duration and Any Field Duration reports. Status Duration report allows you to see how much time each issue spent on each status. Any Field Duration report can do the same for any field. For example you can see how long an issue was flagged and was not flagged.

Wait, it gets better. Any Field Report can do this for status and flag fields at the same time. You can get reports showing the flagged/unflagged breakdown of each status time or the status breakdown of overall flagged/unflagged times.

I don't have good-looking data on this but below is a screenshot showing an AnyField Report based on Status and Flaged fields at the same time. I hope it will be enough to give an idea.

Time in Status can also calculate the averages of those times, grouped by fields you select. For example you can get status/flagged average times per issue type.

And of course all of those can be shown in various chart types.

With AnyField Report, you can do the same for other fields as well. For a more advanced use case that can also report on block reasons, please have a look at the following use case document:

https://dev.obss.com.tr/confluence/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=303792739

Time in Status calculates its reports using already existing Jira issue histories so when you install the app, you don't need to add anything to your issue workflows and you can get reports on your past issues as well.

The app has Custom calendar support which means you can get your reports based on a 24/7 calendar or your custom business calendar. (This one is important because a 24/7 calendar in most cases shows misleading data. For example an issue created at 16:00 on Friday and was resolved at 09:00 on next Monday seems to stay open for 2,5 days but in terms of business hours, it is only a few hours. You can see this using Time in Status by OBSS.)

Finally, the app has History Trim feature. This feature allows you to report on a subsection of issue histories instead of the whole history. Very useful when you want to focus on changes made during sprint or project phase.

Using Time in Status you can:

* See how much time each issue spent on each status, assignee, user group and also see dates of status transitions.
* Calculate averages and sums of those durations grouped by issue fields you select. (For example see average InProgress time per project and per issuetype.)
* Export your data as XLS, XLSX or CSV.
* Access data via REST API. (for integrations)
* Visualize data with various chart types.
* See Time in Status reports on Jira Dashboard gadgets (released for cloud, server&DC gadget coming soon)

Timepiece - Time in Status for Jira

EmreT