WIP Aging Chart Gadget, and status versus board column status category -- add a distinction

[Bill Sheboy]

Greetings!

Request:

Would it be possible to add an option to explicitly select either the board column’s value for statusCategory or the value from the mapped status? In the case of collision due to multiple mapped status values, use the board column’s value.

Explanation:

We are experimenting with new Kanban board layouts, and created a board which uses two different status values with categories of “to do”: Backlog and Selected. And we understand that Jira currently drives status category by the column position, and not the actual status category of the mapped status values. For example below is a common Kanban board layout:

Backlog …Jira says…this is To Do	Selected …Jira says…this is In Progress	Building …Jira says…this is In Progress	Testing …Jira says…this is In Progress	Done …Jira says…this is Done
mapped to “To Do”, with a statusCategory of “To Do”	mapped to “Selected”, with a statusCategory of “To Do”	mapped to “Building”, with a statusCategory of “In Progress”	mapped to “Testing”, with a statusCategory of “In Progress”	mapped to “Done” status, with a statusCategory of “Done”

Jira does this apparently to simplify reporting for Scrum, and does not handle such cases for Kanban-using teams well. When we try “WIP Aging Chart Gadget“ for this use case, we note this text in the settings for Age calculation method:

• The time since the first occurrence in an “in-progress” status or board column

So it appears the board column interpretation of statusCategory is used for this gadget rather than the actual mapped status value, subject to whether a board or a filter was selected. “Selected” is not normally considered part of in progress for a Kanban team, so adding a configuration will allow teams to more accurately manage this distinction for WIP.

The only work-around I have discovered is to create a second board just for reporting, which excludes Selected issues using a different board filter.

Kind regards,
Bill

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[Danut M [StonikByte]]

Hi Bill.

The gadget uses the “Display chart by” setting to determine which statuses to consider as WIP and how to display the data.

If “Display chart by” is “The statuses of the issues“, it will consider as WIP all the statuses with status-category “in-progress“ no matter if you have a board or filter selected.

If “Display chart by” is “The columns of the selected board“, it will consider as WIP all the statuses mapped on “in-progress“ columns of the board, no matter what status category they have.

When “Age calculation method” is “The time since the first occurrence in an in-progress status or board column“, it calculates the age as the time between the moment the issue reached a WIP status for the first time (considering on what you set at “Display chart by”) and the current date.

I hope it is more clear now. To me the screenshots that you provided look good, the gadget behaves as I described.

Perhaps the on-screen texts/labels are not clear enough or confusing. Let me know if it is the case and we will try to improve them. Any suggestions are welcome.

Danut.

[Bill Sheboy]

Thanks for the explanations, Danut. I believe the field labels are okay; they were just subject to some interpretation.

The issue I was raising was based upon an ever-improving Kanban team, and so they may change their board layout/columns and not change all of the status values immediately. This creates the problem I described. My work-around seems to work for the team currently: I created another board just for the dashboard, and eliminated the status values causing problems with the board filter.

Kind regards,
Bill