Creating Jira Dashboards for Specific Purposes

Apr 18

Jira dashboards are great tools for reporting. And the best thing about them is that they are easy to create. You can create some dashboards within seconds or minutes and change them on the fly. Because Jira dashboards are so useful and easy to use, you might want to make one for each report. That way, you can easily get insights from your data at a glance.

Here are some examples of Jira dashboards you can create:

One dashboard for each project
Multiple dashboards for a single project
One dashboard combining data from multiple projects
Private dashboard for each user or team member

It's important to note that the best dashboard is one that correctly conveys your data to your team members or stakeholders.

Sample Dashboards

1. Daily stand-up Jira dashboard

This dashboard uses three gadgets, namely Sprint Burndown, Sprint Health, and Issue Statistics.

Sprint Health and Sprint Burndown are both excellent starting points for discussions about how the team is performing during the current sprint. They both offer graphic reports of your progress over time.

A sprint burndown chart will show you how much you have accomplished and the total number of tasks remaining before the end of the current sprint. This chart is useful in predicting the likelihood of completing your tasks on time. On the other hand, Sprint Health displays the number of days left in your current sprint. A day is calculated using an increment. If there's no more time left, it displays zero (0).

Issue Statistics gives you a more granular view of your data. For example, in Sprint Health, you have the status updates "Done," "To Do," and "In Progress." With this view, you have no way of knowing if an issue under "In Progress" is already in development or quality assurance. Issue statistics can give you this information.

You can further improve your issue statistics visually by swapping them with a color-coded bar chart. You can check out our example below.

It's a good idea to start with just a few gadgets per dashboard so that it will not be overwhelming for the person viewing it. As a rule of thumb, use no more than six gadgets on one dashboard.

Team-level progress dashboard

Our team-level progress dashboard gives you an overview of the team's progress in connection with the bigger goals (epics) and smaller goals (sprints). It's a great way to keep your team motivated to contribute more towards achieving the overall goal of your organization.

In our sample dashboard, we used the Custom Charts for Jira to create a 2D stacked bar chart that shows the story points completed by each assignee per sprint. This chart is useful for understanding the team's capacity. For example, if Morgan's average is 6 story points per sprint and Lindsey's average is 9, you may have to allocate more work to Morgan in the next sprint to keep a balanced workload.

There is also a 1D bar chart in our dashboard that shows the issues under each epic by status. This information gives you an insight into how things are going across your organization.

Jira Dashboard for retrospective meetings

The best dashboards are those that focus on just a few important things specific to what viewers of the dashboard would like to track. Fewer gadgets mean less clutter, which is good for the eyes. We applied this principle when we created the Jira dashboard for retrospective meetings. Let's also remember that a focused approach will only be effective if you know what data to focus on. It should be something that your viewers would like to see.

When your team did not accomplish as much as you planned and you want to track what's causing the problem, a scattershot approach can help. With scattershot, you can easily track what's causing the problem, and from there, you can start checking on more specific items.

To delve deeper into your retrospective items, you can use these 3 gadgets:

Multiple Two-Dimensional Filter Statistics - You can use this for filtering issues to further break down categories
Pie Chart - Use this to give you a quick overview of your issues, grouped by assignee, status, etc.
Jira Roadmap - This chart is useful for showing a list of versions that are due for release. It also shows the number of issues resolved and unresolved for each version.

A 2D Filter Statistics gadget does not look good visually. You can enhance this by using Custom Charts for Jira to create attention-grabbing multiple 2D Stacked Bar Charts like in our example below.

If you are investigating impediments (anything that's stopping your team from completing a ticket), a Scope Creep Chart would be helpful. This chart will tell you why your current progress is slowing down. To make this report, you'll need to create a filter on a ScriptRunner Jira Query Language (JQL) function. You can use this filter in the native Filter Results gadget.

Moreover, if you have Custom Charts for Jira and want to improve them visually, you can change the Filter Results gadget into a Custom Charts Pie Chart, just like in the example below. You can't make pie charts based on story points in native Jira, but you can do so with Custom Charts.

Program-level dashboards in Jira

A program-level dashboard is a great way to get a summary view of multiple related projects. You could use it if you have issues that are dependent on or related to other issues.

Before creating this dashboard, it's important to know the limitations of Jira when storing project information. For this reason, it's a good idea to download and use the Projectrak app, which is available from the Atlassian Marketplace.

In our sample dashboard below, we combined Projectrak gadgets with Custom Charts for Jira to track issues and projects across sprints, projects, releases and teams. The Issues in Active Sprints chart gives you an overview of the total number of issues for all active sprints. If you want to know how many issues are in progress and done for each project, the Status of Issues Across Projects can tell the numbers.

Conclusion

There is no such thing as the ultimate dashboard. A good dashboard is visually appealing and relays the information you want to see in a quick glance. With native Jira, it's difficult to create visually appealing dashboards because of its many limitations. This is where custom charts for Jira come in handy.