JIRA Agile comes with a number of useful charts and reports to help you visualize your team's performance and identify potential bottlenecks in your Kanban process. To generate a report, perform the following steps:
As shown in the following screenshot, there are a number of reports that are available. The reports under the Agile section are specifically designed for using agile methodologies such as Kanban. Of course, the other reports such as Pie Chart Report are also very useful, but since these are vanilla JIRA reports we will be focusing mainly on the agile reports, namely Cumulative Flow Diagram, and Control Chart:
The first useful chart JIRA Agile provides is the cumulative flow diagram. This chart shows you the number of issues (y axis) in various statuses, displayed as colored bands, over a period of time (x axis). This way, you will be able to visually identify if there are any bottlenecks in a particular status in your team's workflow, as you will see a widening in the colored band representing the status.
To generate the cumulative flow diagram for your Kanban board, perform the following steps:
The second useful chart, to help you measure your team's performance, is the control chart. The control chart shows you the average lead time of your team over a period of time, and plots the issues on the chart so you can see the following:
- Any issues that are outside of the standard deviation, also known as outliers
- The average time taken to complete tasks
- The team's rolling average and how it compares to the average
To generate the control chart for your Kanban board, perform the following steps:
- Click on the Reports tab from the left panel of your board.
- Select the Control Chart option.
As shown in the following screenshot, the control chart shows:
- Issues on the board represented by green dots. A hollow green dot represents a single issue and a solid green dot (bigger) represents multiple issues. You can click on these dots to see the issue details.
- The time period shown as dates, on the x axis.
- The duration it takes for issues to be completed, on the y axis.
- The average duration for issue completions shown as the red line.
- The average lead time for issues shown as the blue line. A downward trending blue line indicates improvements in efficiency.
- The standard deviation shown as a light blue band:
Generally, you would want to have the blue line trending downwards; this would indicate a decrease in the average lead time. This means issues are not stuck in workflow statuses and are being completed quickly, and that your team is not overbooked.
You would also want to have a low standard deviation. This is an indication of how each issue is measured against the rolling average (blue line). The narrower the blue band, the closer each issue is being delivered to the average time. This means that it's more likely the team will be able to deliver work in the same cadence.
The control chart has several customization options that allow you to fine tune the data being displayed on the chart. These options are displayed below the chart itself, as shown in the following screenshot:
When you first start working with the control chart, you would want to identify and remove the outliers from the chart as they can often skew your data and give you incorrect readings.
Outliers are the green dots far above the light blue band; these are often issues that are created or transitioned incorrectly due to human error. You can easily filter out these issues by applying a label to each of the issues and creating a new quick filter. To do this, perform the following steps:
- Review each outlying issue, and apply a label (outlier) to it if confirmed to be an outlier.
- Create a new quick filter for the board with the following JQL:
labelsnotin(outlier). - Select the new quick filter from the Quick Filters field on the control chart.
You can use this technique to filter out other issues that might skew your chart, such as duplicated issues.