How can I track the daily number of items entering and exiting a specific status in Jira Cloud?

[Philipp Rosenboom]

I'm using Jira Cloud and need to generate a report that shows the number of items entering and exiting a specific status (e.g., "Blocked") on a daily basis. Essentially, I want to see a trend like:

• "Yesterday, 3 items were in the 'Blocked' state; today, only 1 item remains blocked."

I’ve already tried using the free add-on "Status Time Free", which shows how often an item has been in a specific status, but it doesn't give me a day-by-day overview.

Ideally, I'd like to visualize this information on a dashboard gadget so that the data remains up-to-date and accessible to my team without any manual data export/import.

Are there any built-in reports, gadgets, or free add-ons that can achieve this? If not, are there any creative workarounds or automation rules that can help me get this information?

[Shawn Doyle - ReleaseTEAM · Accepted solution]

Hi @Philipp Rosenboom 

There are multiple ways to achieve this.  One is with a filter list macro and using the 'was' condition in JQL.  You can have multiple filters looking for yesterday today -1, -2, -3 etc. Put these on a dashboard or a confluence page.

something like

status was Blocked ON -1d

Would give you all things that were Blocked yesterday.  There many shortcuts as you could just use the keyword 'Yesterday', but to get the day before or more in the past, -2d -3d etc.

The filter list is the simplest but may not be the best format-wise, once you get it working here, you can explore the other free macros and using the same format, see which ones work for you.

[Philipp Rosenboom]

Thank you @Shawn Doyle - ReleaseTEAM 

I tried the filter you suggested and it does show the data I need. However, I still have two small issues, maybe you have another tip:

1. The data includes items that are closed and never spent any time in a blocked status, especially not recently. Do you know why this might be happening?
   My current filter is: project = TEST AND issuetype != Sub-Task AND status WAS Blocked ON -1d ORDER BY Rank ASC
   About 95% of the returned items are old closed issues that were never in a blocked state. If I add something like status != done, it looks correct, but then I’d theoretically exclude issues that were blocked yesterday and are now done.

2. I can create multiple filters, each looking further back in time, but showing multiple filters on a dashboard isn’t ideal. Is there a way to display this data in a graph or at least combine it into a single widget (something like the “created vs. resolved” chart)?

[Shawn Doyle - ReleaseTEAM]

On point 1. Are you sure that is your entire query? 

On point 2, there are macros that will display multiple filter results, some are paid via the Marketplace.  Play around with them and see if any work for you.

[Philipp Rosenboom]

Yes, I´m sure that this is the full query (see attachments).

I can tell you, we didn`t had 565 items in blocked yesterday :) 

[Shawn Doyle - ReleaseTEAM]

That is interesting, I had suspected there was a sneaky 'or' in the JQL that was allowing those done issues to show up.  Doesn't look like that is the case.

I tried reproducing this on my instance, but it worked as expected for me, however my test instance is fairly spartan.  Could you post your workflow?  It seems unlikely but maybe your workflow goes thru blocked for some reason on the way to Done. I've seen weirder things.  Otherwise maybe a bug in how the 'was' is implemented that it sees all these Done issues.

[Philipp Rosenboom]

I think this must be an issues inside the "was" implementation, as the shown number is a strange subset of the done. Initial I thought this items was ever in blocked (maybe years back), but some of them never was in this state. But I can`t be sure for this, as the workflow has been changed several times in the past and with this the visible history of the flow has been updated. Still at the end they wasn`t in blocked a few days back, as the workflow is the same since at least one year.

Please see the workflow below we use for Stories (majority of the 565 items are Stories). There is a way that an item would be "in progress" and goes from here to "blocked" and get marked as "done" after (worst case). Still only a transaction I can do (by permission) and for sure didn`t run for more then 500 items (yesterday!).