Tracking Reopen Counts with Timepiece - Time in Status for Jira

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Introduction

Tracking Reopen Counts is essential for teams looking to identify Jira workflow inefficiencies. If a work item keeps moving back and forth between the same statuses, it's usually a sign of miscommunication or unclear requirements. This kind of backtracking leads to extra work, slows things down, and makes it harder to get things done on time.

To keep things running smoothly, teams need to know how often issues are reopened or statuses revisited. Spotting these patterns early can help fix problems, improve teamwork, and make the process more efficient.Let’s see how Timepiece - Time in Status for Jira can help track reopen counts and give teams the feedback they need to work better. 

Challenges

When issues reopen, it means extra work for the team and causes delays in getting things done. As a result, productivity drops, and deadlines become harder to meet. Most of the time, this happens because everybody on the team isn’t on the same page. For instance, they might be missing details, or there may be unclear feedback. Consequently, they end up handing over incomplete work to each other, leading to repeated revisions.

The problem is, that it’s not always easy to notice this repeating pattern in your daily work. Without a clear way to track these patterns, teams might be falling into the same pitfall over and over again.

As the first step of a root cause analysis, you must identify which issues and statuses are following this re-work pattern.

Tracking Reopen Counts with Timepiece

With Timepiece - Time in Status for Jira, teams can easily track how many times issues are reopened and which statuses are revisited. You can easily spot patterns, and take action to improve their workflow.

Status Count Report is the first choice for this need. This report clearly shows how many times each issue has moved into each status. With this visibility, you can instantly pinpoint tasks that caused rework.

 Here you can see the status count report by how many times statuses were visited by each issue

Highlighting Issues with Sorting and Filtering

With the Filter and Sort options of Timepiece, you can quickly identify the issues that jump between the same statuses. 

For example, following up on our example above, you can use the Filter option to find issues that visited the In Progress status more than once.

Here we can see that out of our 10  issues, 6 issues were reopened at least two times.

As a second step, you can use the Sort option to bring the issues with most reopens to the top.

Here we can see that some of the issues were reopened several times. These are the ones that we need to focus our investigation on.

Using Average Status Count for Better Insights

You’ve found some problematic cases, identified root causes, and implemented some improvements. Now what? How will you see if things are getting better or not?

For that, you can configure the Status Count Report as an Average report, grouped by months, weeks, days, etc.

Here you can see that the average use of the InProgress

Conclusion

For people tasked with the management of any team, Tracking Reopen Counts with Timepiece is key to reducing rework and improving workflow efficiency. With Timepiece - Time in Status for Jira, teams can easily monitor how often issues move back and forth, spot problematic work items, and take action to minimize unnecessary rework.

This data helps improve communication, refine processes, and keep projects on track.  This is the second article in our four-article "Timepiece Quick Wins" series.In the first article, we discussed how to Find Workflow Delays with Timepiece.For more details, visit our Atlassian Marketplace page or the Timepiece website.