Metric for time taken: Story or Task + bugs

[Bud Herz]

Challenge -
Create a dashboard metric that shows total time taken for a Task or Story in a Sprint including related bugs.

Scenario - 

Bugs are not pointed, but viewed as part of total effort on a Story or Task. I need to find total time taken (including bugs) to complete the parent Story or Task. 

[Bill Sheboy · Accepted solution]

Hi @Bud Herz 

As with similar needs not supported in out-of-the-box Jira, you can build something or buy something from the marketplace.  (If you wait a moment a vendor, or three, will offer ideas... :^)

To build this, you could add some custom fields, use automation rules to set them based upon status transitions, and add other rules to sum the total into the parent.  Dashboarding is more difficult, as not many of the built-in ones support generic numeric display.  A work-around for that would be to create time buckets as discrete values (e.g. 0-1d, 2-5d, etc.) and dashboard those separately from the raw time duration total.

The fuzzy part here is how do you associate a defect (bug) with a story?  If you have created bug-sub-task types, or are using links, the summation should be straightforward.  If you are using some other indicator it may be more challenging to sum up.

Kind regards,
Bill

[Bud Herz]

Hi Bill,

Thanks for the ideas. I was hoping there was some new level of Metrics Mojo with JQL I had not yet discovered. 

We've tried a few different time tracking flavors like you suggest, but they have always come up just a little short. So I'm on the hunt. 

Thanks again though.

[Julia Shcherbyna _SaaSJet_]

Hi @Bud Herz 

As an alternative, you can try Time in Status for Jira Cloud developed by my team. 

Here is Use Case that can help How to get time in status data by Epics?

You can get time data by Epics using the Pivot Table function.

Also, you can select Layout options for your report.

Hope it helps. If you have any questions, be free to ask.

Regard, 

Julia

[Emre Toptancı [OBSS]]

Hello @Bud Herz ,

This is an interesting one. I think our app Time in Status can help. It is available for Jira Server, Cloud, and Data Center.

Time in Status basically allows you to see how much time each issue spent on each status or assigned to each assignee. You can also combine statuses into consolidated columns to see metrics like Ticket Age, Cycle Time, or Lead Time. 

You can calculate averages and sums of those durations grouped by the issue fields you select. 

Now comes the interesting part: The default report calculation shows status times per each issue. The sum report can group status times but it works with field values, not links. You said you are linking bugs with stories. If you can create a custom field named "Related Story" and put the key of the related story to this field on both bugs and the story itself, you can use the sum report of Time in Status and group by this Related Story field to get the report you need.

I am showing some sample screenshots below. I know none of them shows exactly what you are looking for but should give you an idea. The solution I propose will look like the one with the Epic keys below, but it will show you stories.

 

  

The app calculates its reports using already existing Jira issue histories so when you install the app, you don't need to add anything to your issue workflows and you can get reports on your past issues as well (presuming that you create this Related Story field and populate the values for past issues as well).

Time in Status reports can be accessed through its own reporting page, dashboard gadgets, and issue view screen tabs. All these options can provide both calculated data tables and charts.

Using Time in Status you can:

• See how much time each issue spent on each status, assignee, user group and also see dates of status transitions.
• Calculate averages and sums of those durations grouped by issue fields you select. (For example, see average InProgress time per project and per issue type.)
• Export your data as XLS, XLSX, or CSV.
• Access data via REST API. (for integrations)
• Visualize data with various chart types.
• See Time in Status reports on Jira Dashboard gadgets

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1211756/

EmreT

[Bloompeak Support]

Hi @Bud Herz ,

For the sake of simplicity I assume that your workflow has New, In Development, In Testing and Done statuses for stories. Unless all the bugs are solved, the story should not be set to Done status. Then measuring the status duration from "In Development" to "Done" for the story itself will be enough.

This data is available in Jira Rest API. It provides status transition date and time for each issue. It returns json, then you need to calculate it by coding which parses issue history rest api json for each issue.

Or you can search for marketplace apps which does the same for you. One of them is  Status Time app developed by our team. It provides reports on how much time passed in each status, status entry dates and status count.

Once you enter your working calendar into the app, it takes your working schedule into account too. That is, "In Progress" time of an issue opened on Friday at 5 PM and closed on Monday at 9 AM, will be a few hours rather than 3 days. It has various other reports like assignee time, status entry dates, average/sum reports by any field(eg. average in progress time by project, average cycle time by issue creation month). And all these are available as gadgets on the dashboard too. Here is the online demo link, you can see it in action and try without installing the app.

If you are looking for a free solution, you can try the limited version Status Time Free. Hope it helps.

[Chris Boys]

Hi @Bud Herz 

Another off-the-shelf web app alternative for mapping total time is our Team Performance Summary from umano.tech.

To @Bill Sheboy's point above, are you linking your defects with a story?  We can measure it within the total time of story when a defect is created as a sub-task.   If you're not, what you'll see on Umano's dashboard is the type (Story/ Task / Bug etc) and you can eyeball the lead time  / cycle time of a Bug and join the dots with the equivalent story.

You can find out more about how we calculate Lead Time and Cycle Time in our Guide, but essentially Umano is mapping the time from ticket creation through to resolution or done.

You can also see the full range of our measures in our Guide.

Teams value the ability to self-compare their current performance relative to their usual performance (the shaded wave pictured above, representing the rolling median for the last 6 intervals, where the breadth of the wave depicts the range of scores for each interval).

As you can see, our predefined agile success metrics enable greater team observability not just into HOW they're practicing, but also by surfacing the underlying drivers most impacting your team's effectiveness - see the callouts of what practices are impacting the measure. These underlying drivers provide context as to why a team may be above or below it's usual rate of performance.

Interval Reports can be exported as an email.

Hope this helps!  Let me know if you have any other questions.

Chris

[Bud Herz]

That's a pretty spiffy screenshot Chris. Ultimately though I'm not sure how it shows me anything that different from say the Jira chart called 'Control Chart' 

We write bugs against a Story or Task and link them together as "Relates to".  

Since the idea is that a bug doesn't get points, but counts as effort on the original ticket. This is currently for us an unidentified time suck. We estimate sizes at the start of a Sprint, but haven't done much forensics at the end to really tally up the effort (including the bugs). 

Thanks for the offer though.

[Chris Boys]

Thanks @Bud Herz 

We totally get the use case, but aren't serving it right now.  Hopefully you'll find an easy solution crop up from another alternative here in the marketplace.  Good luck!

BTW, just in relation into the differences between Umano and the Control Chart, we like to feel Umano assists with greater context on what's affecting your speed:

• Lead and Cycle time are presented on the same chart
• Your team's practices that impact your score are surfaced
• Wait and Cycle time surfaced for each ticket type
• The team's interval rolling median is presented, rather than mean as in Control Chart

[Rahul_RVS_Support]

Hi @Bud Herz 

If you would be interested in a paid add-on, you can try out our app

Agile Tools : Epic Tree & Time in Status 

The app provides you complete Epic Hierarchy with sum up at each level. You can viewroll up for standard Jira hierarchy. Epic -> User Story -> Subtask

The app also provides Dashboard gadgets for this data.

Thanks

[Bud Herz]

Nice tool, but not what we're looking for. This appears to pull numbers from the Time fields where as we want to use time in status. This also doesn't appear to solve the combining of time taken for a Story + bugs = total effort. 

[Rahul_RVS_Support]

Hi @Bud Herz 

The app has multiple features and one of them is Time in Status. This feature also allows you to group your statuses and define your own lead time and cycle time. There are more than 7 types of status reports which the apps provides.

Please do let me know if you need a demo call and we will be happy to show you all the features of the app. Our mail id is support@rvsoftwares.in

Agile Tools : Epic Tree & Time in Status