Assumptions around "Completed" and Velocity in Jira Agile

Andrew Fisher

I've read that burndown charts burn down when issues are moved the rightmost column on a "work" board (regardless of which, or how many Jira workflow states are mapped into that column). I assume that the Velocity chart's "Completed" stats are driven by the issues in that same column?

We've tried a couple of different column configs (our workflow includes an "Accepted" state to indicate a user story has been tested & approved by the PO, and a "Closed" state for after the user story has been deployed, often after the sprint ends):

1. Both "Accepted" and "Closed" states are mapped to the board's rightmost column (allowing our burndown & velocity charts to correctly show our completed stories, i.e. including "Accepted" and "Closed"). Although we've found that some users are confused by the UI having the rightmost column split vertically into 2.

2. The "Accepted" state maps to the agile board's rightmost column, and the "Closed" state is not mapped to any board column (i.e. when a story is closed, it's done by editing the issue as opposed to drag & drop on the work board). However if a user story is released & closed prior to the end of the sprint, any closed issues don't contribute to the "completed" value in the velocity charts. (From doing a test, in our Jira 6.0 & Jira Agile 6.3.2.2 instance, the "closed" issues are incorrectly listed as still being in "Accepted" in the sprint report).

Any thoughts as to potential best practices / better column configurations for the above?

Thanks!

Renjith Pillai

In fact you should just look at the actual status that you want to track in the board. Those status should be mapped to individual columns in the board. So in this case you need to have two columns one that maps the Accepted status of the workflow and the other which maps the "Closed" state of the workflow.

I would really say you need not have Accepted status in the workflow. That is something which happens in the Plan mode where the PO plans for future sprints by creating a Spring and dragging them to it, which indicates to the team that these are the potential stories prioritized and ready to be picked up in the upcoming sprints.

This means the workflow can be as simple as the default workflow which just has three status - Open, In Progress and Closed and each of them mapping to one column each in the board. And this is essentially the Simplified Workflow that ships with JIRA Agile (a.k.a GreenHopper).