How to exclude secondary issues from Jira-generated data analytics reports

[cherrerag]

My team and I are tasked with negotiating and drafting agreements between our institution and various outside entities, which involves keeping track of the stages of an agreement-drafting process, identifying bottlenecks and collaborating with other departments.  

We use a Gantt diagram in Excel to keep track of our work, but recently we began experimenting with Jira mainly because of the data analytics capabilities that it offers. 

I've been trying out these capabilities by generating pie-charts and such in hopes of finding out how many primary issues (agreements) are in Stage A (preliminary negotiations), how many in Stage B (technical evaluation), how many in Stage C (drafting), etc., where each stage corresponds to a Jira status category. However, when Jira generated the graph it took into account the status of secondary issues as well as of primary ones, resulting in graphs with skewed numbers. For example, I ended up with a pie-chart that measures not only how many tasks have Stage A, B, or C as their current status, but also how many sub-tasks have "To-do", "In progress", and "Complete" as their current status, which isn't very helpful for us.

With this in mind, I would like to know how to exclude the status updates of secondary issues from my Jira table's data reports. 

Thank you in advance for your assistance.  

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

There's a bit of Jira-speak I need to ask for clarification on here.

What is a "secondary issue" here?  Would Jira call it a sub-task?

You say you are creating pie charts, so I'm assuming these are the pie-chart "gadgets" you are adding to dashboards so you can investigate them.  Most gadgets and reporting in Jira is driven by a "filter", and it's really useful for us to know what the filter is when we're looking at gadgets and reports.

A filter is a saved search definition that re-runs every time you visit or refresh the gadget or report.  The filter returns a simple list of all the issues that match it at this time, and the report gets built from all the data currently on all those issues.

Some places also let you select "project or saved filter", but you can probably see that "project" gets read as a filter of "Project = XYZ".

TLDR: we don't know what a "secondary issue" is, so we can't give you exactly what you need, but you probably need to change the filter to say something like "Project = XYZ and not a secondary issue."

[Cristina Herrera-González]

Yes, sorry. Sub-task is what I meant. In Spanish they're called "incidencias secundarias" and I translated literally, haha. 

Basically I want to generate reports using ONLY information from primary issues or ONLY information from sub-tasks. 

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Heh, no, that is not a mis-translation to me, it's Jira-speak not translating well between Spanish and English.

You could run things with filters that explicitly include only the issue types you want to see, or exclude the ones that do not.

For example, "issuetype in (bug, task, feature)" or "issuetype not in (tech-task, sub-task, thingy)"

But I would go for the functions in JQL, using "issuetype in standardIssueTypes()" or "issuetype not in subtaskIssueTypes", as Ojase already gave you.  If you use these functions, you are protected from admins renaming, adding, or deleting issue types!

The advanced issue search was recently (badly) renamed in Cloud to "view all issues".   It's an option in the "filters" menu that is in the top bar.

(I think it's bad rename because it lands on a default filter that is not "all issues", it's only recently create ones.  It should be called just "issue search" really) 

[Ojase Emmanuval]

@cherrerag Please create a filter in JIRA to filter out only the primary issues and generate the pie chart using the created filter. You can use some query like the following. Search should be defined by going into Filters ---> Advanced Search 

Project=XYZ and issuetype not in (subTaskIssueTypes())

Once the query is defined, please save the filter and update the permissions using Details link and configure the pie chart to select the above filter

[Cristina Herrera-González]

Cool, thank you.

The problem is I'm not sure where to acces this "Advanced Search" option. Would you mind walking me through it with a bit more detail?