Cumulative Flow Diagrams

Overview

A Cumulative Flow Diagram tracks progress over time on a scope of work as issues move through project workflows. This simple chart provides a wealth of information about program health, the effect of scope changes, process bottlenecks and team throughput.

Here you'll see how to easily create a Cumulative Flow Diagram across one or many projects, and then break down those results by any combination of JIRA fields such as Issue Type, Component, Assignee or Project.

Creating the Report

Select the Issue Value Snapshots by Date Report.

For report configuration options, set up your report as follows:

Option	Selection	Comments
Time Period	any	Select your dates of interest using relative dates ("Last 3 Months", "This Year") or a custom Start Date and End Date.
Search	any	Select your JIRA projects, project categories and filters of interest. Or click on the JQL tab in that field to enter a command using JIRA Query Language (JQL).
Statuses to Include	all	Select which JIRA issue statuses you wish to include in the report.   Select all statuses in your JIRA instance for a complete picture of scope, scope changes and completed issues.
Value Of	Status (Historical)	We're reporting on issues based on what their status was during each historical reporting interval.
Chart Type		Select the Area Chart.

Now click on the Run Report button to create your report.  

Your results will look something like this:

Segmenting Results

The Segment By field in Dataplane reports allows you to break down report results by any number of different JIRA fields or properties in order to see more granularity.

For example, when looking at a Cumulative Flow Diagram for a program of multiple projects, select "Project" for Segment By to see each project's contribution to the results.  Or select "Issue Type" or "Assignee" or any combination of the above for even more detailed analysis.

In the following report, we've segmented the results by Project:

In this example, we've instead segmented the report by both "Issue Type" and "Priority":

Reporting Based on Sprints

You can hone in on just those issues that were within specific sprints during the selected time period with some JQL.  

For the Search field on the report configuration page, click on the "JQL" tab and enter a custom query like:

project in ("Project A", "Project B") and sprint in (39, 40, 41, 42, 43)

Customizing Chart Colors

In the above charts you can see that as we add additional levels of data segmentation, we can do more detailed, granular analysis. However with lots of series charted at once, there can also be a lot of visual noise.

A good way to improve our ability to analyze report results with many charted series is to use a Dataplane Customizer Script to choose custom colors for the chart.  

To access the Customizer Script field, go to the report configuration tab in your report and click on the More Options link.

Then copy and paste the following script into the Customizer Script field as a starting point. Add additional lines or modify this script based on the specific Status options in your JIRA instance.

customizeChart {
    series "Open" colorLike "aqua"
    series "Reopened" colorLike "blue"
    series "Closed" color "gainsboro"
    series "Waiting" colorLike "orange"
}

What we're doing in this script is coloring similar charted series (e.g. any segmented series that starts with "Open") with similar colors to reduce the overall visual noise.

Here's what our chart now looks like with customized colors:

The value of using a Customizer Script to customize series colors is even more apparent in the following example where the report results are segmented into well over a dozen separate series. Custom colors allow easy reading of the primary status changes in this Cumulative Flow Diagram without giving up the ability to do more granular data analysis.