Jira Reports: Visually Track Your Projects
If you use Jira to manage your projects, to get the most out of it, you need to take advantage of its reporting features. Jira reports can help you track your projects visually, so you can quickly see where things are going well and where they require improvements. In this blog post, we’ll show you the various reports on Jira, how to create them, and how you can use them to monitor your projects.
Types of reports in Jira
Jira offers many different and useful built-in reports to help you get a real-time overview of how your team is doing. Here are the reports available in Jira, broken down into categories:
- Agile reports for Kanban teams
- Cumulative flow diagram
- Control chart
- Agile reports for Scrum teams
- Sprint Report
- Burndown Chart
- Burnup Chart
- Epic Report
- Epic Burndown
- Release Burndown
- Version Report
- Velocity Chart
- Reports for issue analysis
- Average Age Report
- Created vs. Resolved Issues Report
- Pie Chart Report
- Recently Created Issues Report
- Resolution Time Report
- Single Level Group By Report
- Time Since Issues Report
- Reports for forecast and management
- Time Tracking Report
- User Workload Report
- Version Workload Report
- Reports for DevOps
- Cycle Time Report
- Deployment Frequency Report
- Other Reports
- Workload Pie Chart Report
Note: In the later sections of this article, we will cover most of the reports above, but not all. We also won’t be covering reporting in Jira Service Desk or Jira Service Management.
Custom reports in Jira
There are already many built-in reports available in Jira. However, if you want to create a custom report, here are some available options:
JQL queries
Jira reports are actually driven by JQL queries. You can always run your own queries to gain insight from your issues and other data. You can save your searches as filters for future use if you want.
Custom reporting apps in the Atlassian Marketplace
There are many reporting apps to explore in the Atlassian Marketplace if you want additional reporting features.
For example, Projectrak – Project Tracking for Jira allows you to create customizable project fields, track them, and visualize your project portfolio in one place.
Another example is eazyBI Reports and Charts for Jira. It offers dozens of template reports, custom report builders, and interactive reports. This app also allows you to create custom calculations using MDX query language for more advanced Jira reports.
Export reports and issues to spreadsheet apps
You may want to do reporting using spreadsheet apps such as Excel or Google Sheets. In that case, there is an option in Jira for exporting issue data to Excel CSV. You can then use this pulled-out data to generate custom reports in those spreadsheet apps.
A more convenient alternative is using an integration tool such as Coupler.io to pull issue data from Jira to Google Sheets or Excel. With this solution, you can specify which columns to export from Jira if needed. Not only Jira, but you can also import data from other apps such as Trello, Slack, HubSpot, etc., to Google Sheets, Excel, or BigQuery. The best part is that you can even set an automatic report scheduling so that your data is always up-to-date.
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Jira reports and metrics
You can use reports to track important metrics for your projects and businesses. Visualization makes it easier than raw data, so you’ll be able to quickly understand how you’re doing against your goals, benchmarks, and past performance.
Different Jira reports can be used to track different metrics. For example:
- Burndown/ Burnup charts show if you’re on track to complete a sprint, epic, or release.
- Velocity charts show how many story points your team committed vs. completed in each sprint.
- Created vs. Resolved reports show if more work is coming in than the team is able to complete.
- Resolution Time reports show how quickly your team can resolve an issue.
- Version reports can be a great way of knowing whether you are on track with your release.
How to create reports in Jira
To access and create reports in Jira, you can go to a specific project page by clicking the Projects menu in the top main navigation bar. A dropdown showing the most recent projects you accessed will appear. Just click your project, or View all projects if it does not show up in the list.
On the project page, click Reports on the left sidebar. You will see all built-in reports available for the project you selected.
Next, choose a report from the report list.
You may need to supply several configuration options, such as specifying filters or fields to report on. Each report has its own settings, but there are always hints and suggestions on what each one is.
Here’s an example configuration for a Pie Chart Report, where you need to specify the Statistic Type, which is a field for grouping issues in your project:
When you’re done with the configuration, click the Next button to view the generated report.
Jira agile reports for Kanban teams
Jira has Cumulative Flow Diagram reports that help you identify potential bottlenecks in your Kanban process. This way, it’s easy for the entire team to work together and improve things. There are also Control Chart reports which visualize how well your team’s performance is.
Cumulative Flow Diagram report
The Cumulative Flow Diagram shows the number of issues and their statuses over a period of time. The x-axis indicates time, and the y-axis indicates the number of issues. Each colored area of the chart corresponds to a workflow status, which is a column on your board.
This report can help identify any bottlenecks in your team’s workflow. For example, when issues are sitting for too long in the Backlog or when the team is spending too much time working on them—that might mean something is blocking their progress.
If you notice an area that is widening vertically over time, then the status corresponding to this area will generally be a bottleneck. By investigating what’s causing the delay, you can avoid further problems with productivity.
Control Chart report
With a Control Chart report, you can measure your team’s performance. It shows the time spent by each issue in a particular status (or statuses) and maps it over a specified period of time. By seeing the chart, you’ll be able to see the following:
- The average time taken to complete issues.
- Any issues that are outside the standard deviation, also known as outliers.
- The team’s rolling average and how it compares to the average.
An example of a Control Chart:
Here’s the explanation of each element in the Control Chart above:
- The x-axis shows the time period in dates.
- The y-axis shows the duration in days.
- A hollow green dot represents a single issue, while a solid one represents multiple issues. You can click on these dots to see the issue details.
- The red line shows the average duration for issue completions.
- The blue line shows the average lead time for issues.
- The blue shaded area shows the standard deviation.
Generally, you would want to have the blue line trending downwards because it means that there have been improvements in efficiency and issues are being completed quickly.
You would also want to have a low standard deviation. The narrower the blue shaded area, the closer each issue is delivered to the average time. It indicates the team can deliver work in the same cadence.
Jira agile reports for Scrum teams
Jira Agile provides some useful charts for tracking the progress of your Scrum projects. This section will cover three of them: the Sprint Report, Burndown Chart Report, and Velocity Chart Report.
Sprint Reports
Sprint Reports are a great way to quickly view the current status of your sprint. It gives you an instant snapshot of how it’s tracking, with a burndown chart and summary table that lists all issues in the sprint and their statuses.
See the below screenshot as an example:
We explain the Burndown Chart in the next section below.
Burndown Chart Reports
The burndown chart shows you a graphical representation of the estimated or ideal work left versus actual progress. The gray line acts as a guideline of the projected progress of the project, and the red line is the actual progress. In an ideal world, both lines should be as close to each other as possible.
When a sprint starts, a guideline is formed between the start and end dates. This guideline is displayed with a gray line in the chart. It depicts the ideal scenario for executing the issues from the start date of the sprint until the end date.
Once the team starts working on the issues, another line of red color starts following the guideline. This red line shows the total remaining values, usually story points, but they could also be issue count, total days, etc., based on your choice in the dropdown filter.
From the above screenshot, you can see that the details of the individual issues are displayed below the chart. Every time an issue is resolved, its story points are burned, and the total remaining values of the whole sprint decrease. If you take a closer look, all story points were burned, which means that all tasks were completed by the end of the sprint.
Velocity Chart Reports
The velocity chart shows you the amount of work originally committed to the sprint (the gray bar) versus the actual amount of work completed (the green bar), based on how you decide to estimate, such as in the case of story points.
The chart will include past sprints, so you can get an idea of the trend and predict the team’s velocity.
Here’s an example velocity chart that shows four sprints. You can see that the team over-committed in Sprints 1, 2, and 3. For Sprint 4, they completed all their committed work, which is a good improvement.
As your team starts using Scrum, you can expect to see improvements in their velocity. This is because they continuously refine the process over time.
Eventually, you will get to a point where the team’s velocity becomes consistent and can be used as a reliable indicator for work estimation. This will help avoid over or under-committing on work deliveries so that everyone remains happy with their progress throughout each sprint!
Jira reports for issue analysis
There are many reports in Jira for analyzing issues, such as for displaying issues in a pie chart, finding out the average time spent on issues, and more. Let’s take a look at the seven reports available in Jira for issue analysis.
Average Age Report
This report tells you the average number of days for which issues are in an unresolved state on a given date. It can be useful to see how long it will take to work on an issue.
As an example, let’s see the following Average Age Report. It shows a chart with a daily period over the past 60 days:
As you can see in the above screenshot, the report has two sections.
The first one is the bar chart showing the average age of unresolved issues. If you see they’re increasing over a period, this means that issues are not being resolved, and you need to take some action.
The second one is the table below the chart that displays how many unresolved issues are on a specific date, along with their total age and average age.
Created vs. resolved issues report
This report displays the number of issues that were created over a period versus the number of issues that were resolved in that period.
As an example, see the following chart displaying a visualization of the number of issues created vs. resolved within the last 15 days.
The red line shows the number of issues created, while the green line shows the number of issues resolved. Both these lines give a good indication of the overall progress.
Areas in red show periods where more issues were created than resolved, while areas in green show periods where more were resolved than created.
Below the chart, a table shows the issues created and resolved on a specific day in the selected period.
Pie chart report
With pie chart reports in Jira, you can see the breakup of issues based on a specific field, which you can configure before generating the report.
Let’s say you want to see the number of issues by their statuses. To do so, select Status as the Statistic Type on the configuration page. Then, click the Next button.
Example of a generated report:
You can also create similar pie charts based on other fields such as Assignee, Issue Type, Creator, etc.
Recently Created Issues Report
This report displays the number of issues recently created, including their statuses.
By looking at the report above, you can easily find out about the project’s overall progress in a particular month. You can also change this to daily or quarterly on the report configuration page.
The stacked bar chart shows the total issues created over the last few months. The number of unresolved issues is displayed at the bottom in red, while the number of resolved ones is displayed at the top in green. The table below the chart shows the actual numbers depicted on the bars.
Resolution Time Report
This report helps you understand how soon your team can resolve an issue. It displays the average resolution time of the issues in a bar chart, as shown in the example below:
The report shows that the team took a lot of time to resolve issues during the October-December period. You should keep an eye on this and take appropriate action for improvement.
Single Level Group By Report
This report lists the issues grouped by a particular field such as assignee, issue type, project, status, and so on.
Before generating this report, you must select a filter on the configuration page. You’ll also need to specify the Statistic Type, which is a field for grouping issues by.
The following is an example of the generated report. It displays all the issues based on the selected filter and grouped by assignee name:
Time Since Issues Report
This report shows how many issues were created (or updated, resolved, etc., based on your chosen date field) in a specific unit of time of your choice (can be hourly, daily, monthly, etc.).
For example, the following configuration will generate a report showing the number of issues resolved each day for the last 30 days.
The generated report will look like this below:
Jira reports for forecast and management
In this section, we’ll go over the three reports in Jira that can help you forecast and manage your projects. With these reports, you can see whether you are on track or not. Let’s take a look at each one of them below.
Time Tracking Report
This comprehensive report displays the estimated and remaining effort of all the issues. It will also give you an indication of whether they are ahead of or behind the original schedule.
Before generating the report, you can choose which issues will be included in the report. For example, you can select only issues with a specific version:
The generated report will look like:
As you can see, the report above shows the issues within the selected version.
There are four time-tracking fields in the table, which are very useful for time-tracking and costing purposes:
- Original Estimate — The original estimate of the total amount of time it would take to complete this issue.
- Estimated Time Remaining — The current estimate of the remaining amount of time it would take to complete this issue.
- Time Spent — The amount of time spent on the issue. This is the aggregate amount of time that has been logged against this issue.
- Accuracy — The accuracy of the original estimate compared to the current estimate for the issue. It is the difference between the sum of the Time Spent & Estimated Time Remaining fields and the Original Estimate field.
Notice that the report displays totals at the bottom.
User Workload Report
A person may get assigned to multiple projects in Jira because they are responsible for more than one product or service.
This report shows the time estimates for all unresolved issues assigned to a user across all projects. It helps you understand how busy a particular user is and when they expect to finish their tasks. It’s also useful for knowing when someone needs extra help with their workload.
To generate this report, enter a User on the report configuration page. In the Sub-task Inclusion drop-down list, choose which sub-tasks to include in the report:
Here’s an example generated report:
Version Workload Report
This report displays the current workload for a specific version within a project. You can see a list of unresolved issues assigned to each user, each user’s workload, and a summary of the total workload remaining for the version.
Here’s an example of the generated report:
Jira reports: built-in or custom?
Jira has many built-in reports, and we’ve covered 15 of them. In addition, there are options to create custom reports, such as by using JQL, installing add-ons from the Atlassian Marketplace, and exporting Jira issues to spreadsheet apps to be analyzed there.
Should you go with built-in or custom reports?
Well, the answer is always based on your needs.
Built-in reports are easy to access, provide real-time data, and give you enough valuable insight to make better decisions about your team’s progress.
However, if you want richer reporting features, installing add-ons may be best. Or, if you’re going to do analysis outside Jira, such as in spreadsheet apps, then exporting Jira issues to Excel or Google Sheets with the help of Coupler.io may be a good choice. Feel free to contact us if you have any questions about setting up and automating data integration with Jira.
Hopefully, this article has helped you navigate the world of Jira reporting. Thanks for reading!
