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It can work well with Scrum, but it really matters when you start and finish your work items. Many Scrum processes push all their work items into the first workflow stage at the beginning of the sprint, and then push them out of the last workflow stage at the end of the sprint, which makes for irregular predictions. The main thing to remember with the Monte Carlo is that its only input is historical daily throughputs, so you can imagine how the previously described Scrum process would make for an inaccurate Monte Carlo. As long as you understand how the Monte Carlo works and try to only make predictions that make sense with your sprint pattern, it should work for you. Many Scrum teams who use our tool use sprints only for retrospective and planning purposes, not for actual start and stop dates of work items. In our opinion, this is the best of both worlds! Check out our webinar on this topic
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ActionableAgile support the most commons custom field types, here is the full list: jsw-story-points If you have a field which does not show in the drop down in step 3 of the data loading process, it could be because this field type is not currently supported. In this case, please reach out to our support and confirm which custom field type you are missing. This information can only be accessed by your Jira admin in the Custom Field Configuration. |
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ActionableAgile for Jira looks for any items that have been “flagged” with Jira’s native flagging functionality. For every issue (or work item), it extracts “flagged” dates from Jira and uses them to determine how many days the item was blocked. We count partial days as blocked days unless it was blocked and unblocked in the same day. In those cases, that day is not counted as a blocked day. You can see the values that are extracted by opening the Source Data chart in AA and looking at the Blocked Days column.
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In short, no. In our Agile method, the workflow should be linear/one-way sequential. Is blocking something really part of getting it done? :) We recommend leaving the issue in the column where it became blocked and marking it as flagged in Jira, not putting it in a different workflow stage. This allows you to measure total time blocked without disrupting your workflow and our charts will properly recognize blocked time. For more, please read about how we handle backwards flow in ActionableAgile and why in the entry below. Finally, if you have a blocked column at the very right of your board, this will also cause issues with our app not considering work finished when you first load the data. Until you remove your blocked column, you’ll need to uncheck that workflow stage in the Workflow Stages control for all charts so that your analytics will function properly. |
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If an item has been in a workflow stage only once, the date associated with that stage is the date the item entered that workflow stage. If an item has been in a workflow stage more than once, the date associated with that stage is the last date the item entered the workflow stage. Detailed InformationIf an item is moved backwards in the flow, say from step C to step B, it is considered never to have been in step C at all. All of the time in step C will be added to the time in step B. It will get a new timestamp for step C when it reenters that workflow stage. Ex.) Say you got in the checkout line at the grocery store but then forgot something. Until you enter the line for the final time, the checkout line clock doesn’t start. Until then you were shopping, with a slight detour.
For those expecting to see a cumulative total of all days spent for an item in any given stage in the Cycle Time charts, you might be very confused as to why we do it this way. This is intentional as the app is designed for helping facilitate the flow of work through the process as smoothly as possible. The Logic Behind ItIn flow-based systems, we attempt to optimize the journey of the work through your system. Visibility into what happens in each stage is very important to this goal. In a board, when you move a card backward, say from Testing back to In Progress, you lose all visibility that a card was in the Testing state before. It is a statement that it was a false start, it wasn’t ready for that stage so it went backwards. If that isn’t the intent of the backwards motion, there are other approaches to workflow building and board visualization that could be considered that don’t have the negative effect of blocking visibility as discussed above. One is often is to re-think the definitions of the workflow stages. A lot of times we think of an In Progress stage as the domain or inbox of a particular role, say a software developer, and Test as the domain or inbox for someone else, like a QA analyst. Instead, you can consider the “Test” workflow stage to contain both the Test work and all resulting changes. Obviously you’d like for there to be minimal or non-existent work after testing. Keeping an item in Test for the duration of all of this activity really highlights how long it has been since Testing first began and can cause discussions about how to decrease time since Test started (which obviously can vary wildly). It may also make people more cautious about moving forward, which can be a good thing. Did you know?The way we treat backwards movement is actually what allows a Cumulative Flow Diagram to display properly. Lines on a cumulative flow diagram should never go down. | |||||||||||
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In short, no. In our Agile method, the workflow should be linear/one-way sequential. Is blocking something really part of getting it done? :) We recommend leaving the issue in the column where it became blocked and marking it as flagged in Jira, not putting it in a different workflow stage. This allows you to measure total time blocked without disrupting your workflow and our charts will properly recognize blocked time. For more, please read about how we handle backwards flow in ActionableAgile and why. Finally, if you have a blocked column at the very right of your board, this will also cause issues with our app not considering work finished when you first load the data. Until you remove your blocked column, you’ll need to uncheck that workflow stage in the Workflow Stages control for all charts so that your analytics will function properly
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ActionableAgile support the most commons custom field types, here is the full list: jsw-story-points If you have a field which does not show in the drop down in step 3 of the data loading process, it could be because this field type is not currently supported. In this case, please reach out to our support and confirm which custom field type you are missing. This information can only be accessed by your Jira admin in the Custom Field Configuration. |
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ActionableAgile for Jira looks for any items that have been “flagged” with Jira’s native flagging functionality. For every issue (or work item), it extracts “flagged” dates from Jira and uses them to determine how many days the item was blocked. We count partial days as blocked days unless it was blocked and unblocked in the same day. In those cases, that day is not counted as a blocked day. You can see the values that are extracted by opening the Source Data chart in AA and looking at the Blocked Days column.
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The short answer is that you cannot. We have considered this extensively, and there's not much benefit except in the very shortest time frames (sub-week), and those situations are best analyzed differently. There are many complicating factors, including allowing for exceptions, handling holidays, and dealing with work that was completed on excluded days, and in our consulting experience, we have found that for most clients it causes more problems than it solves, without improving the accuracy of the results. The ActionableAgile co-founder and CEO, Daniel Vacanti, writes about this extensively in his books, which we highly recommend. You can learn more about them here.
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