Problem Solved! Fixing Agile Metrics in Jira

If you’ve read my blog in the past, you know that one of my favorite agile metrics – if not my outright favorite – is the Cumulative Flow Diagram (CFD). Until today, I have been creating them manually whenever I had to deal with Jira because the CFD in Jira looks like this:

The basic (and mostly useless) Cumulative Flow Diagram in Jira — A Basic CFD from Jira

This is just pointless, especially if you have a lot of stories in the team’s backlog (as this one does). You can’t see what’s actually happening in any given iteration and can’t really help a team identify opportunities to improve. However, during a call about metrics in a Community of Practice (CoP) meeting today, one of the participants – Ashutosh Nagarkar – pointed out that the CFDs take their data from the current board’s filter query.

Wait, WHAT?!

Very happy to be proven wrong, I tested it. And he was absolutely correct! I was shocked – pleasantly – to see this CFD generated when I updated things:

A Great Cumulative Flow Diagram in JIra — A Much More Useful CFD from Jira

So now we can generate a CFD for any iteration. This is game-changing for me. It’s definitely not as easy as doing this in Rally or Version One, but hey – I’ll take what small improvements to Jira I can take.

Setting Up the Board

The first thing you’ll need to do is get a board configured. I created a new board and named it appropriately:

You’ll need to go in and edit the filter query. I just set this one up to filter off the current project and current iteration, like this:

The Query to filter for agile metrics — The Query – Replace the Boxes With Your Info

Then just Save As your new query name (I called mine “<Team Name> Current Iteration Query”. Pretty basic.

But if you just try to access the Cumulative Flow Diagram report now, you’ll still see everything. What gives?

Selecting the Board Query

You’re going to need to do one more thing to make it work correctly. Go back to Configure Board and you’ll see the Filter Query box (as below):

Query Attributes of a Jira Board — The Filter Selection for the Board

Now click in the box and start putting in the name you put for your query and it should pop up in the auto-fill if you saved it correctly. Now if you try to look at the CFD you should see only the current iteration’s data.

You need to change the date range (I used Custom) to reflect the start/end dates for our iteration and got this report:

So far so good! You should now be able to view your current iteration’s CFD. But if you share that link with everyone else, they won’t be able to see it. Why’s that?

Sharing Agile Metrics

Jira has one more piece of administrivia to address. You have to make the query available by sharing it with a group of users. If you click on the “Edit Filter Shares” link below the Shares link you’ll get the following screen:

How to edit who can see your filters — The Edit Filter Shares Screen in Jira

I just selected the “jira-software-users” which allows anyone to access your filter. NB: It might be named differently in your instance. Click “Save” and then you should be able to share the link – with your board and query – and everyone will be able to view them correctly.

Closing Thoughts

I hope this little guide helps you create your own Cumulative Flow Diagrams correctly. CFDs are incredibly powerful agile metrics and can help you identify some common anti-patterns for your team to tackle. And – again – a huge shoutout to Ashutosh for pointing out the right direction to create this solution!