What Atlassian considers correct or what is the correct way to count days in columns?

Carolina Castro_qfpw3a

I'll take my ACP-620 soon and I'm still confused on how to count days in columns in relation with commulative flow diagrams as, in my mind, I should not see one issue in two different status, at any given time on the diagram.

How do you explain what Atlassian considers correct or what is the correct way to count days in columns?

 

 

Stephen.Lugton

Hi @Carolina Castro ,

I had a look at the article about a cumulative flow diagram (CFD) that @Matteo Vecchiato linked; the example given there is fundamentally wrong, which will not help you.

The example is:

1. If you start a sprint with 5 work items, they will begin in the To Do column. If you view the CFD, it will show 5 work items To Do, 0 work items In Progress, and 0 work items Done. 

2. If you then move 2 work items to In Progress, the CFD will display 5 work items To Do (because 5 have passed through that column), 2 work items In Progress, and 0 work items Done. 

3. If you then move 1 work item from In Progress to Done, the CFD will show To Do = 5, In Progress = 2, and Done = 1. 

4. If you then take that 1 work item out of Done and move it back to To Do, the CFD will remove the 1 from Done and remove 1 from In Progress, but the numbers in To Do will remain the same, because no new work items have arrived. Therefore, the CFD will show To Do = 5, In Progress = 1, Done = 0.

Looking at that example it appears that in step 2 there are 7 items in the CFD but there are only 5 work items, so it's counting 2 work items twice.

If an item were in two statuses at once, the data representation would be incorrect and the fundamental principle of tracking work items through a sequential flow would be violated. 

The way a CFD should work is that a single work item can only be in one status at any given time. The diagram tracks the cumulative count of items within each stage of the workflow, meaning an item moves from one stage to the next, it doesn't exist in both simultaneously. 

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