Is there a way to exclude cancelled work items from the velocity report?

Question

Our teams would like to have the velocity report exclude work items that were cancelled as it impacts their metrics.  We've recommended that they first remove it from the sprint but they often forget or would prefer to not remove an item that they committed too.  Our next suggestion was to reduce the points to zero.

Curious if there's a way to simply exclude them altogether from the velocity report without remembering to do one of the above options.

Thank you!

Alexey Pavlenko _App Developer_ · Answer

Hi @Rebecca Hylek ,

I would try to exclude cancelled tasks from the board JQL itself. Therefore once the tasks are cancelled, they disappear.

Another option in order not to change the board JQL and have more flexibility - the app I developed - Multi-team Scrum Metrics & Retrospectives - with it you can use custom JQLs on top of any metric.

Configuration screen:

3 boards/teams in the same view, 1 period selected for analysis:

Also, with the app you can:

* Track:* Data across sprints, months, quarters, half-years or years. 
* Several teams (including those ones sharing the same project) at once.
* Velocity, capacity, allocation, completed story points (completed scope), planned (initial, final scopes), added and removed scopes, as well as other metrics. You can even create your own custom metrics using JQL.
* Trends and average metrics across periods.

* Conduct Quantifiable retrospectives.
* And many more.

Best regards,
Alexey

Paul Glantschnig _Appfire_ · Answer

Hello @Rebecca Hylek,

The board-filter route is the right native lever here: the velocity report itself can't be edited, but excluding cancelled items from the board filter (or moving the Cancelled status to an unmapped column) keeps them out of the Committed and Completed totals.

If you'd also like a points-per-sprint view that you fully control, and you're open to an app from the Atlassian Marketplace, JXL for Jira can build one. It's a spreadsheet/table view for Jira where you group by Sprint and add a sum-up on the Story Points column, so each sprint shows its total. Because the sheet is driven by JQL, you decide what counts: a scope like ... AND status != Cancelled simply leaves cancelled items out, with nothing for the team to remember per sprint.

This is a table-based, completed-points-per-sprint report, not a replacement for the native velocity chart's committed-vs-completed bars or its historical trend. For a clean per-sprint total that automatically ignores cancelled work, though, it does the job without touching board config.

And @Bill Sheboy makes a fair point worth weighing: if cancellations are becoming routine, the report tweak treats the symptom rather than the planning cause.

Disclosure: I'm on the JXL team.

Cheers, Paul

Bill Sheboy · Answer

Hi @Rebecca Hylek

I have observed all the methods you described (and more) to "remove" cancelled / abandoned items from a Jira board's sprint velocity report...and I often return to the question: Why do that?  What problem is being solved?

When a team plans a sprint, the Sprint Backlog is their forecasted plan to meet the sprint goal.  They do not intentionally plan more than what is needed, or items which do not contribute to the goal.  Thus, it is an exceptional rather than normal event for sprint items to be cancelled / abandoned.  (When the entire goal is cancelled, that is different as the sprint itself is halted.)

When a team makes cancelling work items a "normal" event that may cause unintended consequences...such as disincentivize them from addressing what could be improved in planning to prevent this situation.  Rather than modifying the board filter, work items, etc. to alter the velocity, perhaps chat with the team to learn what was different in the planning or conditions that led to the idea about cancelling the items, and use that information to select experiments for how to improve.

Kind regards,
Bill