Can I use time tracking fields in a Pie Chart?

[Kathy Tempesta]

One of my users asked me why he can't select "Original Estimate" as the field to create a pie chart with and I can't find a good answer to his question. Does anyone know what determines if a field is available for this gadget or not?

JIRA 4.3.4

Thanks!

Kathy

[Peter Van de Voorde · Accepted solution]

Hi Kathy,

This is because you can only select fields that have finite values for a pie chart. The Original Estimate field can have an infinite number of values.

Best regards

Peter

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

To expand on what Peter said - the Pie chart counts unique instances of values, not the actual values themselves. Which renders the original estimate useless as a field to base the chart on.

The original estimate is, as Peter said, an effectively infinite field, but that in itself is not directly the issue with the Pie chart - the problem here is that you could have 1000 issues, each with different estimates - that would actually generate a Pie chart with 1000 slices, all the same size, because they're all different values. Similarly if you had 10 issues, 9 estimated at 1 hour, and the last one at 10 hours, you'd get 2 slices, 9/10ths and 1/10th respectively.

I suspect your user would be utterly bemused by this because they'd be expecting something based on the actual values of the estimate. Reusing the second example, they'd expect to see 9 small slices of 1/19th each, and then 1 large slice at 10/19ths.

[mwarton]

This is trivial to do in a report using Intelligent Reports. You can format your report/pie chart in Microsoft Word and then fill in the data using simple rules, which can easily handle using orignal estimate or any other numeric field.

In fact the Project timesheet and All Projects timesheet example reports that come with the plugin already contain nice pie charts broken down by user, issue and project. There is a free trial, so feel free to try it out.

[Hipcricket]

As I recall I used to be able to do this a few years ago. I would choose a filter, and then choose to see Original Estimate per Assignee. It would just sum all the time per assignee for the issue in the filter. I was a great way to balance hours amongst the team and view it on the dashboard in a pie chart. Bummed I can't do this anymore.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

You've never been able to do this. Unless

• your "original estimate" was actually a custom field that was a list type field and not the estimate field
• You had a plugin that gave you a pie chart on estimates
• You had a plugin providing a field that did something whizzy and clever with estimates and then reported the answers as a list of options so the pie-chart gadget could read it

[Kathy Tempesta]

Thanks! I knew I was missing something obvious.