Make your own cross-team burndown charts on Jira Dashboards
Tempo Team
Jira users don’t just want to see progress happening now in their reports. They want to see how things fare today compared to yesterday. Progress over time. And a visual indicator of how they’re tracking towards completion on a sprint, release, or strategic goal.
In other words, a burndown of work.
This is why we have introduced issue history reporting to Custom Charts for Jira and Confluence. Users can now build burndown and burnup reports based on whatever data they like. So, not just past issue statuses but previous assignees, earlier priorities, old labels, fix versions that issues were previously part of, and more.
Importantly, this feature allows for burndowns across multiple teams and projects. This makes it useful both for individual agile teams and Scrum Masters/product owners, and program managers who wants a bird’s eye view of whether all their teams are on schedule to deliver.
Issue history reports: standard Jira vs Custom Charts
Burndowns based on sprint, epic, or release come out of the box with Jira. However, none are customizable. You can’t change colors, show/hide data, add labels and descriptions, or choose a different chart type; the sprint burndown is a line chart, the epic burndown is a bar chart, and if you don’t like it, tough! And there are no burndowns based on assignee, priority, or other system fields. Moreover, only the sprint burndown is available as a dashboard gadget; release and epic burndowns are project reports only and as such can’t be added to a Jira dashboard.
In addition, native burndowns and burnups only report on a single sprint, epic, or release. This is a problem if you’re a big enterprise with multiple agile teams and you want to see progress over time across all of them.
Custom Charts for Jira and Confluence lets you build much more flexible issue history reports on your Jira dashboards and Confluence pages. Program managers and Agile Release Train (ART) engineers can build cross-team burndowns/burnups for any kind of data. And they can make charts that look exactly how they want them to.
The chart below is both a 2D stacked bar chart (not available in standard Jira) and spans multiple dev teams. It offers a bird’s eye view of the progress of multiple teams on their October sprints. You can see that across the sprints there were scope changes initially, adding to the teams’ load. By 10th October, it looks like there are no more issues being added and the teams are starting to burn down their work.
You could also make a burndown tracking the progress of multiple teams on a release. The chart below shows a major version being released at the end of the year. You can see that we started the year not knowing what would be part of it, therefore the scope kept increasing until the middle of the year. As of July, more work is in progress and we’ve started burning it down.
You’ll note that we’re nearing the end of the year and there’s still issues in ideating/backlog/to do. This means we should consider if those need to be descoped, or if it’s possible for us to complete that work in time for the release.
If you’d rather see the amount of work completed rather than the amount of work remaining, you can visualize the same data as a burnup (below).
With a full color picker, 10 chart types, and options to show/hide and reorder your data, Custom Charts for Jira and Confluence is a powerful step up from the native Jira reporting capabilities while remaining easy to use.
If you want to start making all kinds of customized burndowns on Jira dashboards and Confluence pages, try our fully integrated reporting apps, Custom Charts for Jira and Custom Jira Charts for Confluence, free for a month.
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