Looking for ideas on generating weekly completion reports

Question

Hey folks.

I have a board where my team is marking new ideas as "done" regularly on a weekly basis, and I'm running into a couple of issues:

1. I'm unable to find a way to automatically populate a property I've created called "completion date". It doesn't appear as an option when creating an automation rule. This means that I must make sure that it's manually populated which isn't ideal.

2. I would love to generate some kind of report where the idea name, completion date, link, as well as a handful of other properties are appended to something like a confluence page. Does anyone have a method similar to this?

Essentially the goal is to capture key details on what's been completed on a regular cadence.

Any ideas? How do you typically handle reporting out of your Product Discover board?

Amina Bouabdallah · Answer

Hey Josh,

For now, you would have to resort to automation for managing a field that would contain your definition of "completed" ideas. We are currently exploring ways to improve this workflow as part of our planning cycle.

If you are keen to chat, please book time here: https://calendly.com/event_types/166549403/edit

Take care,

Amina, JPD PM

Dana Weinbaum · Answer

Hi @Josh

If I understand you correctly, you tried to create an automation and couldn't find the 'completion date' field in the list of fields, correct?

If that's the case, you may be able to populate this field using the 'More options' part of the automation. In the example below, I wanted to un-resolve issues that reopen and there wasn't a way to do that with the fields options (as I could only choose a resolution option and not choose empty...) so I created this very simple JSON to update the Resolution field to be empty.

So in your case you may be able to try:
{
"fields": {
"Completion Date": "{{now.jiraDate}}"
}
}

A few things to note:
1. The field name Jira "understands" might not be as simple as the actual name. If that's the case, try using https://[your company's atlassian url]/rest/api/2/issue/[issue number]?expand=names (for example https://company.atlassian.net/rest/api/2/issue/ABC-30316?expand=names to find all the details of issue ABC-30316, where you'll find how Jira calls Completion Date). 
2. If you created Completion Date to be of type Date (which would make sense...) I believe there's a limitation / bug and PD doesn't regard this field as actual date so you won't be able to filter <= / >= a specific date etc. Which is annoying and I hope they will sort it out. I created a field of type text in order to populate dates (and am not able to filter as I would like, but am able to populate dates).

I hope it helps.

2. You can create a chart in a dashboard of type Filter Results, choose a saved filter (for example a filter where the Completion Date is not Empty), and choose which columns you want to display. You can then share the dashboard with everyone (make sure both the chart and the dashboards are shared with the relevant people). You can also embed the chart in a Confluence page.

Again, I hope it helps :-)

Mike Morper_9dqbot · Answer

Here's a quick thought:

* Build your JQL off of the delivery ticket(s) vs the Idea itself

In our experience, we are finding JPD Ideas to live for some time, and as a result not necessarily "Done." We may keep an Idea ticket open for some time as we are either iterating on delivery (e.g. it takes multiple sprints to complete the work) or simply keeping it open because we don't know what we don't know yet on market acceptance.

By using straight up Jira items (vs JPD items) you can then have better control over what data is being returned and presented into your Confluence hosted report.

And kinda related:

I have found that some (all?) custom fields in JPD are not necessarily exposed in JQL. As such, I have steered away from trying to produce any reports with JPD data via JQL.