Progress Tracker: Epics, Themes, Initiatives

Overview

There is an analogy used by Jeff Patton that I particularly like, and it says something like:

“Think of stories like rocks. A rock can be a boulder or pebble depending on the size (or if it’s dropped on your foot, then it’s a boulder)”

Epics are those boulders that can be broken down into small stories. And epics are quite useful when it comes to breaking down our projects and products into pieces of work that our teams can work in. For this reason, the visualization of the progression in epics is paramount. However, there are other issues in hierarchies that require progress tracking such as Themes, Initiatives or other issue types that your team deemed appropriate.

This gadget displays the progression in the completion of a particular group of epics, themes, initiatives or other issue types by different estimation statistics.

Views

This gadget offers two different ways to track the issues' progress: The Extended view and the List view.

Extended View

This view is thought to display a lesser number of issues but in a more clean way. The completion percentage is rendered as a donut chart with the number in percentage in the middle.

Open

Irene, our designer, thought of the epic names

List View

This view is intended for those cases where the need to display issues goes beyond a few items. All the key information is still available but using a lean design.

Open

Customizable Date Fields

In the gadget configuration, select which date fields will be used as the Start and Due dates. The selected date fields automatically inherit their names as the displayed labels by default.

You can customize the labels shown in the gadget by editing the displayed names. If you map the Due Date field to a custom field called “Last final date”, you can rename it to display as “Project end” in the gadget. Or use the “Created” date as the Start Date and the “Updated” as the Due Date.

Configuration

Name your gadget meaningfully so everyone knows at a glance when to use it. Fill out the rest of the fields as applicable, namely:

• The datasource, where Current indicates the Jira instance where the app is installed.

• The Selected Issues from the result of the JQL (Jira Query Language) query or filter to filter the list of issues (see the JQL documentation). We recommend filtering as much as possible the results to optimize the performance of the dashboard. And remember that the gadget returns the results of the query, which are dynamic and can change over time.

• The start and due dates, select which date fields will be used as the Start and Due dates, and customize the labels shown in the gadget by editing the displayed names.

• The estimation statistic, choose how the completed work in the issue is indicated. Remember, issues without an estimation are not reflected in the calculation.

  • Issue count. The work done in the issue will be measured by the number of children issues completed.

  • Story points (company-managed projects, former classic projects). The work done in the issue will be measured by the story points estimations the team did on the children’s issues.

  • Story points estimate (team-managed projects, former next-gen projects). The work done in the issue will be measured by the story points estimations the team did on the children’s issues.

• The entity type, choose what type of issue do you want to track progress: Epics, Themes, Initiatives or other issue types that can hold children issues.

• The View type

  • List View, where issues are displayed in a table-like format to maximize the number of items displayed.

  • Extended View, where issues are displayed in more clean and visual way.

Integrations

We are working on our growing catalog of Dashboard Gadgets: KPIs and Metrics, but drop us a line in case you want us to expedite a specific one, visit our Help Center.

Dashboards

This gadget is not included in any pre-defined dashboard; check other orphan gadgets:

See also