Plan vs. Reality? ❌Stop Relying on Issue Status and Dates❌

“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” -Mike Tyson

Jira provides the tools you need to map out a game plan, but once things are in motion, reality rarely matches up. Do all of your issues get picked up by the start date and completed by the end date? Are the requirements in each issue fully understood by contributors? Just how ‘in progress’ are issues that are In Progress? 

Sound familiar? You might often spend countless hours tracking people down and calling for extra meetings to understand what is truly going on. We can’t rely on an issue’s dates and status to give us the full picture. And nobody has the capacity to click into every issue to figure out what’s at risk.

 

What we really need to see is ACTIVITY.

  • For software teams, true issue status is best identified by associated development activity. Did the developer create a branch? Have commits been made? Is there a pull request open?
  • Or how about an issue with lots of chatter? More comments may mean something is not well defined. Are there questions needing clarification? Is that issue going to hit its deadline?
  • Time logged, days since last status change, issues reverting in status… there’s all sorts of hidden activity data that can paint a picture and help us identify what needs attention. 

 

If you want to float like a butterfly and sting like a bee (sorry, I’m keeping the boxing references going), you need visibility into activity.

 

Plan and Adapt with a Unified Git + Jira Activity View

As fun as it is to complain about something without having a solution, I can thankfully offer one here. It’s called Team Insights for Jira, and it just launched into Preview. 

This free app provides a familiar Gannt chart view of epics and issues, but then enhances that view by ovelaying user activity from Jira (status changes, comments, time logged) and Git repositories (branches, commits, pull requests, tags). Users can filter by project, sprint, contributors, issue type, and more to drill down on the exact list of issues that matter to them. This comprehensive visualization enables Jira users to easily see how work is progressing against plan, and it’s based on real-time activity data.

With easy access to this data, every team member can clearly see what needs attention and make better decisions about what should be prioritized. And standups and retrospectives become exponentially more productive because teams can easily compare the plan to what was actually done. 

Team Insights for Jira is free for use with Jira data (e.g. status changes, comments, time logged, etc.). For Git Integration for Jira users, git repository activity is automatically included in Team Insights for Jira without any additional setup. Not a customer? Try a free 30-day trial.

 

TeamInsightsForJira-Issues.png

17 comments

Dan Breyen
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May 5, 2023

Thanks for the post. Looking forward to implementing this.

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vikram
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May 6, 2023

Thanks @Dave Bor 

good and useful information, we are using partly. 

Vikram P

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Chris K
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May 8, 2023

Nice add-on, will check it out, since we are trying to create an overall overview of our team activities. Currently, trying to create a view via advanced roadmaps, but different project configurations, issuetypes and workflows complicate things a bit :)

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Fabio Racobaldo _Herzum_
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May 8, 2023

Thanks @Dave Bor . Do you have any info about performance with a lot of tickets within my plan?

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Mikael Sandberg
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May 8, 2023

Nice!

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Kishan Sharma
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May 11, 2023

Seems like a great add on for real-time activity data! 

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Graham Twine
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May 12, 2023

I am going to give this a spin.

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Craig Nodwell
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May 12, 2023

I'll give this one a Trial.

Sachin Dhamale
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May 29, 2023

Planning + Execution is important

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Rilwan Ahmed
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May 30, 2023

We use GIT for confluence. Time to try Git for Jira. 

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Piyush A (STR)
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May 31, 2023

Simple but most efficient to state and discuss. Since, the due date and start date etc are system ones and they have integration with others, they are important but also not reliable upon too !!!

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Anthony Morais
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June 14, 2023

Hi @Dave Bor 

Thanks for sharing, I'll try it out!

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Tim Perrault
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June 16, 2023

Free is honestly one of my favorite selling points. Will have to go try it out.

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Alexander Pappert
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June 26, 2023

looks good, need to take a deeper look when we were migrated to cloud

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Raymond Muyuka July 7, 2023

i need to dive deeper int o this Thanks 

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Rama krishna July 12, 2023

Thanks for the Post

Stephan Shere
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August 2, 2023

Estimate planning can be daunting! Velocity is still one of the best ways to track, but really, any trackable values can be used, as long as they are accurate and modeled correctly! It's still an art of it's own!

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