What's your best Jira Software tip/trick/workaround?

[Iago Docando]

Sooo... dashboards. I've taken a good look at my dashboards and the only gadgets I really use are:

1. the results for a specific filter
2. timesheet report
3. bidimensional statistics
4. bubble graph
5. piechart

I've done very cool things in the field of interactive visualization options for my customers but I've done that by using jira as a data source for power BI.

I might write an article about that since I haven't found a ton of documentation out there. I know now there is a connector but I get all my data from web requests.

[Corinne Dent]

Hi @Iago Docando - I wanted to circle back here. Is there anything you want to share as a tip for others? Maybe some more details around your top 5 charts and what they help you with?

[Iago Docando]

Sure. I thought it was pretty self explanatory, my bad.

The first thing to have into account could be designing a good number of custom JQL searches that return the the different set of issues your different teams might find useful.

If work is very compartimentalized maybe you don't need this because filtering by project might be enough but I would say that in most SMEs, people is doing a lot of different things all over the place so being able to sort issues out correctly is no less than mandatory.

After that I would say 80% of the gadgets in every dashboard I have are the results for those custom JQL searches. Simply choose the most important colums to show and you're set. You'll have to make sure of having those significant columns, though, custom fields are the key here. 

Refresh the results every little while (15min?) only if you need updated results and you want to set upsomething like a public monitor for everyone to follow it realtime (maybe support related stuff? new tickets still not assigned?). Otherwise you'll be fine just pulling the data when you open your dashboard.

Also worth mentioning is the LAYOUT options. Jira lacks flexibility in this field and community suggestions about it have been dismissed by the developers but what we have right now I find the most useful configuration to be 2 colums, the main one where the filters and timesheet reports are and a smaller one on the right with the small bublle graphs and piecharts. Theese don't need to be huge because they single out the outliers at a quick glance. The best placement for the bidimensional filter would depend on the number of categories you expect the results to fall in. If there are just a couple of categories the small right column might be a good fit, otherwise the main one.