Is there value in retaining historical data in JIRA portfolio?

justin_qgenda

This is more of a philosophical topic, without any "right" answer. I am simply looking for some feedback from other community members and Portfolio users...

 

Currently, when my team completes an epic or initiative (all stories closed/completed), I am retaining all of the completed items in Portfolio, indefinitely. I'm not deleting anything. Everything also exists in JIRA, and all of the reporting that we do on past work currently comes from JIRA, and not from Portfolio.

 

The problem, for me, with retaining all of the "old" data in Portfolio, is that when I want to view the progress of an epic or initiative that isn't closed out, which requires displaying Open and Completed items, all of the old epics and initiatives get mixed in with all of the ones that aren't 100% completed. I could certainly reprioritize all of the "old" items to the bottom of the backlog, to at least get them out of the way, but this seems like a chore. Even though I'm not really using that old data in Portfolio at the moment, I'm hesitant to delete it, because I'm concerned I could be throwing away valuable data. It might be nice to see a feature that would allow displaying completed items in the backlog only if they're associated with Epics or Initiatives that are not 100% complete.

 

Is there value in keeping the old data around in Portfolio, or will JIRA give me all the historical information I'll ever need? I have always seen Portfolio as more of a future planning tool, but I'm very curious to hear the opinions and experiences of others.

 

Thanks!

Martin Suntinger

Hi Justin - great question, curious to see more opinions on this from other users - from a product perspective I'd say at the moment there is not much value in keeping the completed items beyond the completion of a project/planning period, Portfolio is focused rather an future planning. Assuming that all items in Portfolio are linked to underlying JIRA issues, and you have both estimates and also release assignments pushed onto the JIRA issues, a completed item in Portfolio just holds the assigned team and team members as potentially additional data that is not in JIRA since teams are a Portfolio-specific concept right now. I think aspects like the original estimate vs. actual, when did it ship, cycle time between starting progress and completion will be more interesting to look at historically to actually learn from it for future planning, and all this data is better accessible via the JIRA issues.