How can I visualize data from Jira tickets?

[Irena Pavlovic]

Hi all,

My team is using Jira to track capacity. We track capacity in % of time spent on a task on a weekly basis, not in hours spent (e.g., this week I spent 20h creating Jira tickets so I put in 50% in custom label on my ticket called "Creating Jira tickets")

My question is - can I create a chart to visualize how much effort (%) is each team member spending per week on their different tasks? How would I go about doing this?

Alternatively, if you have any better ideas on how to track percentage of time and visualize it, please let me know. 

Jira is confusing

Thx and cheers

Irena

[Ravi Sagar _Sparxsys_]

Hi @Irena Pavlovic 

Let us first talk about storing this information in Jira.

Use Original Estimate field which is a system field. 

• Let us say task has an original estimate of 16h
• Multiple users would then log time they spent on that task, let us say user a and user b logged 2 hours each on a given day
• Natively capacity management in Jira is a bit difficult but you can always create pie charts, look at project's workload report or create a two dimensional filter.
• You can always export data from Jira to another tool for reporting.
• You can also look at eazyBI for creating wonderful reports. (paid app)
• There is also another paid app called Tempo to do proper timesheets in Jira.

Storing percentage in a custom field is a not really manageable solution in long run.

I hope it helps.

Ravi

[Irena Pavlovic]

Thank you, Ravi, for your answer.

The thing is - we don't use estimates nor hours to log our work.

Is there a way to visualise data put in other fields? not the system fields?

[Pablo Beltran _Marketplace Expert_]

Do you mean custom fields?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Using a percentage here makes it impossible to report.  You need to be measuring progress / work in consistent numbers that mean the same thing.  (50% of my week's work is not going to be 50% of your week's work).

Once you've moved to a proper estimate and/or work-log, (hours, days, story points, etc), you'll be able to use the built-in reports to do some of the basics, or look to the apps Ravi mentions.

[Irena Pavlovic]

Pablo: Yes, I mean custom fields

[Irena Pavlovic]

Wait, just to confirm - there is no way to visualize data from custom fields without additional apps, with the tools that Jira offers by default?

[Irena Pavlovic]

Ah no, I see there are some charts and exports. Ok. Thanks all, I'll dig deeper!

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Yes, there are some.

When you are looking through them, do not neglect the ones that talk about "sprints" (if you have Jira software).  A sprint can use any (absolute) number as an estimate, so you might find there are reports or gadgets that can be pointed at your number field and give you some more options.

There are also a few that run off the estimate and/or work-log, but you would have to move to using the time-tracking fields to use them.

[Pablo Beltran _Marketplace Expert_]

She says 20h = 50%. Hence, the problem for reporting is not percentage (units) as you are able to transforma percent into hours and vice-versa. As well you can transform hours into seconds or working days.

Jira is very very flexible and they are not using the standard way, but this dos not mean they cannot track capacity in that way.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Is that true for every possible user?  In real life, it's not.  

%'s are not suitable for tracking, only numbers that represent a value.

[Pablo Beltran _Marketplace Expert_]

Units are totally irrelevant.

Jira stores worklogs in seconds internally, so you need some transformation to convert those records into the target unit for reporting,: hours for instance.

And percents can also be transformed to any other units.

Many organizations use custom fileds to track effort in alternative units, like costs in one or more currencies (USD, EUR, GBP, etc). An that is real World and it works. An international company might want to store costs along with the user's country currency symbol (10.000 $, 10.000 €, 10.000 £, etc). They are strings and not number. Many CEO and directors track work by money not hours, which is better suited for lower level managers,.like project or team managers. Tracking work in time units is better for planning. Tracking work in currency units is better for budgets. And even you can use arbitrary units like Story Ponits in Agile to track Sprints progress.

So units are irrelevant.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

That's what I said earlier.

Percentages are not a unit though, they are a ratio, and you can't usefully use them for reporting anything other than that ratio.

[Irena Pavlovic]

Well, Pablo is right - we measure effort in % because each work week consists of 40 hours (if someone works more than that, then they are over-worked).

True for all possible users.

The report doesn't have to have % in it, but I want to indicate that 100 is the top border, and everything above 100 (%) means the person can't get any more tasks - to put it simply.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

No, percentages are a ratio, not a unit.  They are not suitable for tracking work (but they can be very useful as a report)

But you are using them as a unit, and if you want to call your units a percentage, that's up to you.  But you are going to run into a case where they're not going to work as percentages at some point.  Are you sure everyone will always have a 40 hour week?  Never a part-timer or contractor?

You should obviously be putting the numbers into a numeric field, then you can use some of the reports to get a display of how much each person has, and more if you look at the apps Ravi mentioned (of course, there are a load more reports if you treat your numbers as something like story points, or you log work in days/hours)