Jira reports for managers: how to measure teamwork productivity and quality

[#1]

• Want to increase team productivity but not sure where to start?   
• Is productivity about speed, efficiency, and completing more tasks in less time? 
• What about quality?

Jira is a great place to find it out. With its numerous features and reports, managers are fully equipped to keep an eye on team performance.

1. How productive is your team? Top Jira reports

The best companies are 40% more productive than the others, according to Harvard research. Boosting and increasing team productivity is one of the leading manager’s challenges. But how do you know how your team is tending? Choosing the right tools for measuring is the first thing to do. Productivity can be quantified by determining the average production of the day or the productivity of each employee per hour, day, or month. Let’s look at how Jira can help through its most popular reports.

Velocity

Let’s imagine you’re on a trip. Your car is moving at 60 km/hour – that’s speed, and it’s driving south – that’s direction. Velocity includes both: time rate and course on the road. It goes side by side: when you’re driving in some direction, you need to know your speed. That’s why velocity is a must-track metric for agile teams.

How does it work in Jira?

Jira Velocity report represents how fast your team is moving to achieve sprint goals. On the graph, you can see two bars. The grey one – for the amount of work you’re planning to complete measured in story points (SP). The green one – for the real results your team has reached. For example, you’d like your team to close 150 SP when you actually achieve 130. So, you can regulate your amount of work planning for the next sprint. If you’d like to learn more, here is a little about Story points vs. time spent in Jira. Also, this report allows comparing your velocity up to 7 sprints.

Sprint Burndown

The following report is like your GPS navigator. When you’re driving, it’s good to have an idea if the way is right, especially for the unknown road. Are there some obstacles, blocks, traffic jams? Do you need to speed up or slow down to achieve your destination on time?

Jira Sprint Burndown chart does the work to find it out. It’s similar to velocity because you have a planned amount of work. But you can correct your actions right on the way. If you see your team member stuck with some task, think about how you can help. On the chart, you will see two lines. The red one – for the amount of work your team needs to finish in SPs. The grey line is your guide which represents the ideal burn rate for work. It’s better to follow it if you want to complete everything.

Created vs. Resolved Gadget

If you like to compare how many kilometers you’ve already passed and how many left, try Created vs. Resolved Gadget. You will find it on the Jira dashboard. Here you can set the period you need, not only a sprint. The graph is based on the project or issue filter you selected. Jira shows this data as a difference chart with two lines. A red one represents newly created issues. A green line – issues that have been resolved. 

2. Quality metrics for agile teams

Now it’s time to slow down. Speed could be dangerous at some point. Have you ever felt like doing more in less time results in losing something? We are often mad about speed, time, productivity. And what about quality?

Quality is critical to agile projects. Completed stories are worthless unless they’ve been tested and are performing as expected by the customer.

There are a lot of metrics such as net promoter score, customer satisfaction/customer complaints. If you’d like to know about quality before your clients do, try to measure the following.

Defects

This metric will help you to determine the number of bugs in a project or release. A team should, in theory, thoroughly test stories and avoid escaped defects. With Jira filters and dashboards, you may construct charts to display the defects associated with a specific project, sprint, epic, or version.

E. g. You’d like to know the correlation of bugs for the Development project. To find it out, you can add the Pie Chart gadget to your dashboard. Select Dev project as the basis for the graph and Issue Type as the type of statistic to display. As a result, you’ve got the chart with percent comparison of issue types as depicted below.

You can also create another filter and chose it as the basis. E.g., To get bugs for your project for the current sprint only with JQL help: 

Status and Transition Count

The other way to measure quality is the number of times an issue enters specific status. For example, a developer was working on a feature. An issue was in progress; then it goes for review. QAs found some bugs and returned the task for refinement. So it’s again in progress. The process will continue till everything is fixed. The chances you’ll deliver a high-quality product increase.

You can find the Status Count report using Time in Status for Jira Cloud add-on. It will look like this:

You can filter this report by project, assignee, JQL, sprint, epic, etc. 

The next report is similar to the previous option. Transition Count helps to find how many times an issue went from status to status. So it also will help to measure how qualitative are your team members when performing the task.

Takeaway

As the management guru Peter Drucker said, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” That’s why tracking and reporting are crucial tasks for managers. Someone cares about productivity the most. But quality has definitely to be in place. Jira offers different tools to monitor your team’s performance. Try to use the methods described in the article and share your favorites.

[Ivan Garcia _Appfire_]

Interesting!

[Zoryana Bohutska _SaaSJet_]

@Ivan Garcia _Appfire_  thank you!

[Ulrich Kuhnhardt _IzymesCo_]

Interesting. What numbers should we aim for in status and transition count? High or low?

[Yuliia_Borivets__SaaSJet_]

@Ulrich Kuhnhardt _IzymesCo_ I guess for low. The fewer transitions you have, the better.