ow you can test out a new dashboard gadget powered by ActionableAgile! We plan to release many gadgets but have started with one - a Cycle Time Summary gadget.
Adding the gadget to a dashboard
The dashboard gadget can be found in the “ Add a gadget” window that opens when you click on the ADD GADGET button in the top right corner of your editable dashboard.
Find the listing named “ActionableAgile Cycle Time Summary” and click the ADD GADGET button. You can continue to add gadgets. When you are ready to configure the gadget, click CLOSE to make the window go away.
Configuring the gadget
Once added, the gadget displays the configuration screen
The screen contains the following configurations:
Gadget Title | This will be the text that displays as the title of the Gadget. The default text is “ActionableAgile Cycle Time”. |
Project, filter, and/or board | Choose the project, filter and/or board you want to grab data from. If you choose projects or boards it will use all completed work items. If you don’t want to exclude a subset of items, you will need to create a filter and use that instead. |
Certainty | What percentile do you want the gadget to use to calculate the cycle time summary? The default is 85%. |
Max completion age (in days) | How many days back should the gadget go to grab data for the calculation of cycle time? The default is 90 days. |
Override not yet started statuses | By default we consider work items “not yet started” if the status they are in have a status category of To Do (blue). These workflow statuses matching this default query will be shown as selected. Remove selected statuses you no longer want by clicking on the x icon in the relevant status. To add additional statuses that signify work that has not yet started, click on the down arrow in the form field and select the desired workflow status. |
Override done statuses | By default we consider work items done if the status they are in have a status category of Done (Green). These workflow statuses matching this default query will be shown as selected. Remove selected statuses you no longer want by clicking on the x icon in the relevant status. To add additional statuses that signify done work, click on the down arrow in the form field and select the desired workflow status. |
In the override status configurations, you may see statuses that aren’t relevant to your work items as we have to query for all workflow statuses in your Jira instance and their status categories.
Finished Configuring? You’ll see that the number of issues matching your query are shown in the bottom left. Once you are happy with your configuration, click SAVE .
You will want to make sure that your workflow statuses have status categories set. In this first release we are relying on the status category to denote when items have started, in progress, and are completed. We allow you to override done statuses and soon we’ll allow you to override statuses that are not started.
Understanding the Dashboard View
The Cycle Time Summary dashboard gadget provides a percentile based view of how long it took you to get work done in the past.
85% of items completed in the past 90 days took 14 days or less
Calculating your cycle time with a certain probability lets you communicate a probabilistic forecast for the future (assuming the future you’re forecasting for will roughly resemble the past you’re pulling the data from.)
How is this useful? The above assumption notwithstanding, you can expect a new work item you start to finish in 14 days or less 85% of the time. This expectation is something that Scrum and Kanban communities are beginning to call a Service Level Expectation or SLE. The SLE is intended as an internal facing measure that teams can use to measure and manage predictability.
Read more about cycle time and the SLE in our Cycle Time Scatterplot documentation.
Viewing the list of Jira issues in the Issue Filter
In the bottom-right of the dashboard gadget you’ll find two icons. Click on the first icon to open up a Jira Issue Navigator screen showing the issues used to calculate cycle time. You can see the JQL query that the gadget constructed based on your configurations.
If you’d like to view this data in ActionableAgile, save the filter and then use the data loader to select the saved filter. As always, you’ll need to ensure that the workflow mapping you do in ActionableAgile matches what you configured for the gadget. Note that currently the filter is being set using a specific day. This makes it hard to continually use the saved filter in ActionableAgile. We will be updating this soon to use a relative date.
Downloading a CSV of the calculated start and end dates
In the bottom-right of the dashboard gadget you’ll find two icons. Click on the second icon to download a CSV file to your computer
The CSV will have just three columns:
Jira ID
Calculated Start Date: the date that an item entered the In Progress workflow status category
Calculated End Date: the date that an item entered one of the configured Finish stages
We will be updating this CSV export soon so that you can upload it into ActionableAgile, but we focused on getting this out for troubleshooting purposes first.
Have Questions or Feedback?
Reach out to us via our support portal. We’re happy to help you through issues and hear your suggestions!