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Days Active Indicator?

Randy O'Neal

Both of my teams have switched to Kanban. We are watching WIP closely, both at the issue level and at the epic level. We're watching the cycle time and control charts to see what's been happening, and we've been slowly, steadily growing in the number of days we're taking to get stories completed. One of the indicators I've been monitoring is the "Days in column" indicator; this helps in the isolation of a particular status column, but it can be deceiving.

If a story languishes in progress for 4,5,6 days or more, then it finally moves over to be verified by QA, the "Days in column" starts over... but in reality, we may be in days 7 or 8 or 9. I currently have a story that's been in QA for 4 days now... but the harsh reality is it's been in progress since August 3rd.

I need some sort of indicator - on the card if at all possible, in a gadget at the minimum - which will show me in real time how long the issue has been in progress... through all the gyrations and transitions from column-to-column. The cycle time charts and control charts will tell me all about this after the fact, but it doesn't help me during the time when I could be asking others to lend a hand to get the issue through the pipeline.

Does anyone have any suggestions? I'm trying to employ Great Gadgets WIP Aging chart, but at the moment I can't seem to get it to produce anything useful. I figured out what I was doing wrong with the Great Gadgets WIP Aging Chart... turns out I had an empty column on my board I didn't realize I had... eliminating that at least gives me a gadget I can park in a dashboard to report the metrics I'm needing... but I'd still like to have something on the cards on the Kanban board itself. I've looked at canned content such as the "Days in column" indicator, but there doesn't appear to be anything of a cumulative nature.

Open to suggestions, and - as always - many thanks in advance!!

Randy

Accepted answers

Bill Sheboy

Hi @Randy O'Neal

First a disclaimer: I am just a user and do not work or speak for Atlassian or any marketplace vendors. With that out of the way...

Addons like Great Gadgets are helpful for going beyond the built-in measures. I have used them for a while with some success. There is a feature of their gadgets which allows exporting the data, if you want to analyze later outside of Jira.

But to have the data stored with the Jira issue, such as to display on the board cards, it needs to be in a field. One way to do that is with a custom field and automation rule, as I described here a while ago: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Automation-discussions/What-is-your-most-useful-automation-Here-is-mine/td-p/1560668#M34 A limitation of this approach is when issues move backwards in flow. For teams following conservation of flow that should not be a problem (e.g., abandoned means "abandoned", and not "back to the backlog...").

There are variations to that rule approach, if you want business days (or harder still, business hours). Once your field is populated, you can report on it, show on dashboards / cards, etc.

Kind regards,
Bill

All comments

Bill Sheboy

Hi @Randy O'Neal

First a disclaimer: I am just a user and do not work or speak for Atlassian or any marketplace vendors. With that out of the way...

There are variations to that rule approach, if you want business days (or harder still, business hours). Once your field is populated, you can report on it, show on dashboards / cards, etc.

Kind regards,
Bill

Randy O'Neal

@Bill Sheboy thanks for the thorough response. I figured this would be the approach... I was hoping there would be something more "already there"... but it honestly doesn't surprise me this has to be a "roll your own" solution. It also makes perfect sense that a custom field would be required to get the information on the card/board.

For now, I've been able to get Great Gadget's WIP Aging chart to show me what I want to see; depending on how this intel is received by my team, I may need to take the next step and put it right in front of them with a custom field, but I'd rather see if I can accomplish what I need to accomplish without the automation/custom field work. But thank you for laying out - step by step - what will be required to make this work... this is what I need, and I thank you for it!

Randy

Bill Sheboy

In my experience, one key to managing WIP / WIP aging is tight feedback loops. At every standup, help the team understand why more is pulled when stuff is in-progress already. And at the retro, take a longer look at any "WIP debt" that occurred.

Randy O'Neal

Bingo. Exactly. Thanks!!

Emre Toptancı [OBSS]

Hello @Randy O'Neal ,

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

Time in Status mainly allows you to see how much time each issue spent on each status or each assignee.

tisCloud_StatusDuration_LeadTime_with Estimates.png

You can combine the time for multiple statuses to get metrics like Issue Age, Cycle Time, Lead Time, Resolution Time etc.

One important note for your particular case: If an issue visits a status multiple times, you can get your reports to show the first visit, the last visit, or the total time for all visits.

For all numeric report types, you can calculate averages and sums of those durations grouped by the issue fields you select. For example total in-progress time per customer or average resolution time per sprint, week, month, issuetype, request type, etc. The ability to group by parts of dates (year, month, week, day, hour) or sprints is particularly useful here since it allows you to compare different time periods or see the trend.

tisCloud_StatusDuration_LeadTime_Average_TimeGrouped.png

The app 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. It supports both Company Managed and Team Managed projects for Jira Cloud.

Time in Status reports can be accessed through its own reporting page, dashboard gadgets, and issue view screen tabs. All these options can provide both calculated data tables and charts.

Timepiece - Time in Status for Jira

EmreT

Mehmet A _Bloompeak_

Hi @Randy O'Neal

You can try Status Time Reports app developed by our team. It mainly provides reports and gadgets based on how much time passed in each status.

Here is the online demo link, you can see it in action and try without installing the app. For your case, you can have a look at Time in Status for Each Issue report. For further details, please see Status Time Reports How to Videos.

This app has a dynamic status grouping feature so that you can generate various valuable reports as time in status, time in assignee, status entry dates and status counts, cycle time and lead time, average/sum reports by any field(e.g. average in progress time by project, average cycle time by issue creation month).

You can search issues by Project, Issue Type, Status, Assignee, Issue Creation/Resolution Date(and any other Date field) and JQL Query.
Status durations are calculated according to the working calendar you define. Once you enter your working calendar into the app, it takes your working schedule into account too. That is, "In Progress" time of an issue opened on Friday at 5 PM and closed on Monday at 9 AM, will be a few hours rather than 3 days.
You can set different duration formats.
You can export reports in CSV file format and open them in MS Excel.
You can also add this app as a gadget to your Jira dashboards and reach “Status Time” from Issue Detail page.
You can enable/disable access to Status Time reports&gadgets and Issue Detail page per project, users, groups or project role.

If you are looking for a completely free solution, you can try the limited version Status Time Free.

Hope it helps.

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