Introducing our first Kanban report for next-gen projects - Cumulative flow diagram!

[#1]

• Do you fail to meet your SLAs regularly?

• Do you have doubts about achieving your deadlines?

• Do you have trouble delivering value at predictable intervals?

If the answer to any of these questions is yes, then you’ll benefit from applying a cumulative flow diagram to your process.

Agile teams adapt to change quickly, but bottlenecks may arise due to these rapid changes. These bottlenecks have to be identified first, before they can be resolved.

The Cumulative flow diagram shows the various statuses of your project's issues over time for an application, version, or sprint. It's a visual indication of how many issues are passing through each column of your board.

• The horizontal x-axis indicates time, and the vertical y-axis indicates issues.

• Each colored area of the chart equates to a workflow status (i.e. a column on your board).

This helps you see which columns accumulate more issues than others, and identify bottlenecks in your team's workflow. It’s predominantly used by Kanban teams, but is useful for Scrum teams working with sprints as well.

What did we improve from the CFD in classic Jira?

• A fresh coat of paint using colors from the Atlassian Design System.

• Performance improvements for projects with large amounts of data.

• Usability improvements, including legends as checkboxes to toggle columns.

What’s next?

We’ll be monitoring usage and feedback to help us understand the value you’re getting from this report, as this will help us prioritize improvements.

How do I get this for my project?

If your project has Reports enabled, you’ll be able to start using it right now.

If not, navigate to Project settings > Features and toggle the Reports feature.

What do I do if there are issues?

We're still polishing the last few rough edges around the feature, so feel free to reach out to our support team if you encounter any issues.

Here is some support documentation on what's available right now for the report.

[Stephen T]

Instead of Issue Count, can CFD be set to total story points?

[Ivan Teong]

@Stephen T Cumulative flow diagrams cannot currently be viewed by story points, only by issue counts. Unlike the scrum reports, cumulative flow diagrams aren’t usually based on estimates such as story points.

The common problem with using story points is that the varying levels of granularity can mean that one story is far larger than another. In theory, a single user story should not affect cycle time significantly and should not create bottlenecks, but if you violate some rules it might be the case.

• Breaking down work: Normally, you should have consistent cycle times for work items with the same story points or within the same classes of service. To manage work items with estimates, you may want to break down work further so that user stories are roughly the same size.
• WIP limits: The Work-in-Progress (WIP) states, which is measured along the vertical axis and indicated by the area between the lines that are not the “backlog” or the “deployed” states, directly impacts the time to value of Cycle time and Lead time. Reducing WIP by enforcing WIP limits for relevant columns to spot and remove blockers will ensure a smooth flow to provide for the most effective business value realization.

In any case, you can watch and vote for it, explain why you need story points and we will take note of it in https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSWCLOUD-18381

[Karanpreet Kaur]

We would love to have these new and cool features enabled for JIRA Data Center. For financial services, the infrastructure is mostly on-prem, and we want to utilize such features for our teams, to get the most out of Atlassian products.

[Scott Sobieraj]

The axis marking of the CFD makes it very difficult to read for long-running projects with large issue counts.  I have demarcations bimonthly, and identifying the difference between 405 issues done and 410 issues done over a 2 week period is impossible.

If the mouse could show the Y axis value as you slide along the X axis, that'd be very valuable.  Alternatively just show a numeric readout of the flow over the selected time period.

If I zoom in, small enough timeframes just look flat when there's actually 5-10 issues being completed over that time.  However, because the Y axis starts at 900 the visual difference is very small.  My suggestion would be to have the "zero" value of the Y axis be the minimum value for that time frame.

[Dirk Jansen]

I agree with Scott that not resetting the y-axis makes the CFD unusable for projects that have been running for some time. 

[Trisha Kunst Martinez]

@Ivan Teong I agree with other comments.  Typically the issues showing up under "done" in a CFD are only those issues that moved to the status "done" during the time frame of the report.  When all done issues from the project's start are included, you get a graph that looks like this for a One Month CFD!  Hard to read!

This from someone who thinks the CFD is the best project / program management tool of all time!  I once used a CFD to determine we had fallen three days behind, and sure enough, somebody had taken three days of vacation.  This tool is not yet awesome in this JIRA version.  Please fix that big old pile of "done" taking up all the screen real estate!

[Steven P]

Use the refine report dropdown and deselect the Done button.  Then they disappear and you just see what's in progress. 

Using the same filter you can toggle what you see and get a burndown, burn up or straight forward cumulative flow diagram.  It's great!

But.. I still don't see a way to embed this in confluence to help make a master Execu-dashboard.

[paru.madhavan]

Hey @Ivan Teong ,

I want to track Cycle Time for one of my teams currently using a Next Gen Scrum Board.

However, I keep getting an "Invalid Date" option on any time scale that I pick.

Help!

[Ivan Teong]

Hi Paru,

Can you please raise a support ticket for the above so the developer on support can have access to your instance?

Regards,

Ivan

Product Manager, JSW

[Marwan Saab]

Hi @Ivan Teong ,

We are facing the same "invalid date" issue on 2 different Atlassian accounts - is it possible that this is an issue/bug with the current version of the report?

Regards,

Marwan

[Matthew Christian]

Can we filter for individual users? The old Cumulative Flow Diagram used to have a refine reports filter.