🔍 Throughput chart analytics: Measure what your Agile team actually delivers 📊

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Tracking what your Agile team truly accomplishes over time is harder than it should be. Without clear visibility into delivery patterns, teams struggle to forecast capacity, spot declining performance, and identify bottlenecks before they escalate.

Enter the Throughput chart - part of the Agile Velocity Charts app by Broken Build - a powerful analytics tool that shows exactly how much work your team completes across sprints, months, or quarters.

👉 See the interactive Throughput chart example 📊 - adjust settings, test configurations, and explore how it works with your own data scenarios.

But before we dive into what makes this chart so effective, let's look at why Jira's built-in option falls short.

The limitations of Jira's native chart

Jira includes a Velocity Chart that displays a single team's committed versus completed work compared against a fixed average. While it provides a quick snapshot, the native solution has significant gaps.

Here's what's missing:

❌ Single board limitation - no way to track multiple teams or view ART-wide throughput in one place

❌ Fixed sprint grouping - results can only be displayed by sprint, with no option to group by month or quarter for broader trend analysis

❌ No custom breakdowns - you can't drill down by issue type, status, assignee, or other fields that matter to your workflow

❌ Inflexible metrics - the average is calculated automatically with no customization options, and you can't define what "done" means for your team

❌ Zero filtering options - no ability to focus on specific epics, releases, or use JQL queries to analyze targeted work

These limitations make it nearly impossible to get the comprehensive throughput insights that scaling Agile teams need. That's where a more powerful alternative comes in.

Powerful alternative: Throughput chart by Broken Build

The Throughput chart by Broken Build fills every gap left by Jira's native reporting. It's designed for teams that need flexibility, multi-board visibility, and granular control over their throughput analytics.

Whether you're tracking a single team's delivery health or monitoring throughput across an entire Agile Release Train, this chart adapts to your process, rather than forcing you into rigid constraints.

Ready to see what makes this chart indispensable? Let's explore the features that transform how you track and improve team delivery.

Throughput chart: Key features & JTBD

The Throughput chart gives you complete control over how you track, analyze, and act on delivery data. Here are the five core features that make it work.

📊 Multi-board throughput analysis

Track collective throughput across multiple boards in a single consolidated view. Select several teams as your data source and normalize results by grouping data by sprint, month, or quarter - perfect for teams running on different sprint schedules.

Drill down into individual team performance by clicking any time period and opening the Breakdown section, where you can group results by board and add layers of analysis using fields like assignee, status, or issue type.

🎯 Why this helps:

• Visualize ART-wide delivery - see how all teams in your Agile Release Train are performing together

• Balance workload effectively - identify which teams are overloaded or underutilized based on throughput patterns

• Spot systemic issues fast - uncover bottlenecks affecting multiple teams and drive program-level improvements

📈 Trend lines & averages

Switch to the Lines view to make throughput trends visually obvious over time. Completed work appears alongside a configurable average line that you can set as the mean across all sprints, the mean over recent sprints, or the median.

This visual comparison makes it easy to spot patterns that bar charts might hide.

🎯 Why this helps:

• Identify delivery patterns - recognize upward or downward trends that signal improving or declining team health

• Benchmark against stability - compare current throughput to established averages to assess performance consistency

• Drive targeted improvements - use trend data to adjust processes, remove impediments, and optimize workflow

📌 Target lines

Add customizable target lines to track team or ART KPIs directly on the chart visually. Configure each line with distinct colors - green for exceeding targets, amber for meeting minimums, red for falling short - and assign meaningful names to clarify expectations.

🎯 Why this helps:

• Make KPIs visible to everyone - ensure all stakeholders understand performance thresholds without digging through documentation

• Highlight risks proactively - spot when teams consistently fall below targets so you can intervene before problems compound

• Align team goals - create a shared understanding of what "good" throughput looks like for your organization

⚙️ Custom estimation & done criteria

Adapt the chart to your team's unique process by selecting any estimation field - issue count, story points, effort, or custom fields from your Jira instance. Define what counts as "done" by choosing relevant statuses from the Done category, like Released or Dev Done.

🎯 Why this helps:

• Align with team practices - track throughput using the metrics that actually matter to your workflow, not generic defaults

• Ensure reporting accuracy - eliminate confusion by explicitly defining completion criteria that match your team's reality

• Enable cross-team comparability - standardize how "done" is measured across teams for meaningful performance comparisons

🔍 Issue filtering and sprint configuration

Filter issues by type, epic, release, or custom JQL queries to focus analysis on specific work - like tracking only user stories or analyzing a particular Program Increment.

Control which sprints appear in the chart by setting the display count, including or excluding closed, active, or future sprints, and filtering by sprint name.

🎯 Why this helps:

• Focus on what matters - eliminate noise and analyze only the work relevant to current priorities or strategic initiatives

• Clean up messy data - exclude irrelevant sprints or issues that skew results and muddy insights

• Create targeted reports - build different views for different audiences without maintaining multiple chart configurations

✅ The bottom line: These features work together to give you complete visibility into delivery performance, from high-level ART trends down to individual team breakdowns, all customized to your process.

How the Throughput chart works in action (Interactive example)

Want to experience the chart before committing? The interactive example lets you explore every feature hands-on.

Test different board configurations, adjust averages and target lines, apply filters, and see how the chart responds to various data scenarios. It's the fastest way to understand how throughput analytics can transform your workflow visibility.

👉 Try the interactive Throughput graph 📊 - no installation required.

Experiment with the settings, explore different views, and find the configuration that best suits your team's needs. The more you explore, the clearer your implementation strategy becomes.

Throughput chart: Pro tips

Here are some advanced techniques to maximize the value you get from throughput analytics.

Short intro: Once you've got the basics down, these pro tips will help you extract deeper insights and avoid common reporting pitfalls.

📅 Group by month or quarter for big-picture trends - When monitoring long-term delivery health across multiple teams with varying sprint schedules, switch from sprint-based grouping to monthly or quarterly views. This eliminates sprint-date mismatches and reveals patterns that shorter time frames obscure.

🔄 Use median instead of mean for volatile throughput - If your team's throughput fluctuates significantly due to external dependencies or variable work types, calculate the average using median rather than mean. This provides a more realistic benchmark by reducing the impact of outliers.

🎨 Color-code target lines to match your performance tiers - Set up multiple target lines with intuitive colors (green = exceeding goals, amber = meeting baseline, red = below acceptable) to create instant visual feedback. This helps stakeholders grasp performance status at a glance during reviews or executive reports.

🔎 Combine JQL filtering with board selection for precision reporting - When you need surgical analysis - like tracking how throughput on high-priority bugs compares to feature work - use JQL filters alongside board selection. This gives you granular control without creating dozens of specialized boards.

Setting up the Throughput chart on your Jira Dashboard

The Throughput chart is part of the Agile Velocity Charts app, available as a separate gadget or inside the Agile Reports & Gadgets bundle.

Setting up the chart on your dashboard takes just minutes, and you'll immediately start seeing actionable insights into team delivery patterns.

Here's how to get started:

1️⃣ Navigate to your Jira dashboard

2️⃣ Click "Add gadget"

3️⃣ Search for "Agile Velocity Charts"

4️⃣ Click "Add" and configure your settings

You're all set! The chart updates automatically as your teams complete work, giving you real-time visibility without manual effort.

🎯 Start tracking what actually gets delivered!

Throughput analytics transform guesswork into data-driven decision-making. When you can see exactly how much work your teams complete over time - and compare that performance against targets, trends, and historical averages - you gain the clarity needed to forecast accurately, balance workload, and drive continuous improvement.

Key advantages of using the Throughput chart:

• Track delivery across single teams or entire ARTs in one consolidated view

• Compare performance against customizable averages and KPI targets that reflect your goals

• Drill down into team-level and issue-type breakdowns for root cause analysis

• Adapt metrics to your process with custom estimation fields and done criteria

• Focus analysis on what matters using flexible filtering by epic, release, or JQL

👉 Explore the interactive Throughput report 📊 to see how these features work together in a live environment before setting up your own.

Ready to bring this level of insight to your workflow? Install either the Agile Velocity Charts app as a standalone gadget or grab the complete Agile Reports & Gadgets bundle, which also includes the Agile Velocity Chart, Agile Cycle Time Chart, and Agile Burnup Burndown Charts - everything you need for comprehensive Agile analytics in Jira. Start with a 30-day free trial, and if you're on a team of up to 10 users, it's completely free forever.

🚀 Try the Throughput chart gadget today and see how visibility into delivery patterns changes the way your team operates.

✨ Measure what truly matters, spot problems before they escalate, and deliver with confidence.