JIRA Scrum Dashboard

Over the last year I have utilized Atlassian’s JIRA issue-tracking system for monitoring the progress of various scrum development teams. JIRA is a very versatile tool for Agile software development, however, like any other tool, the more you use it the more you find out about its limitations. In regards to scrum, I find the Active Sprint Board view to be rather cumbersome to use, if you are working with a large number of stories and sub-tasks. What we use instead for our larger teams, is a JIRA Dashboard. This allows us to view all the work in one screen and allows project managers to monitor the sprint progress as well.

Display Current Sprint Overview

To start with you will need to create three filters and share them with the project. The first filter is to retrieve all stories and task tickets for the current sprint. The next filter retrieves all sub-task tickets for the current sprint. The last filter is to retrieve any open bug tickets; this may be optional on how you handle defects in your project.

project = PROJ-X AND issuetype in (Story, Task) AND Sprint in openSprints() ORDER BY Rank ASC
project = PROJ-X AND issuetype = Sub-task AND Sprint in openSprints()
project = PROJ-X AND issuetype = Bug AND status != Closed

Now that we have our filters, we will create a new dashboard. I personally prefer the middle layout which gives you a smaller left column and larger right column; however you can choose whichever layout you prefer.

For the right column, add three Filter Results gadgets. Using this gadget, we can display Stories, then Sub-tasks, and then any open Bugs. In the Filter Results configuration, set the following columns to display for Stories:

• Issue Type
• Key
• Sub-Tasks
• Summary
• Epic Link
• Story Points
• Status
• ∑ Progress
• Assignee
• Linked Issues

For Sub-Tasks and Bugs, you do not have to add as many fields, but you can see what works for you based on the fields listed above.

On the left column of the dashboard, some recommendations would be to add the Sprint Health gadget and Sprint Burndown gadget. I also recommend adding the Issue Statistics gadget to display Status for Stories. Although I am not a fan of the Pie Chart Gadget, you can also add this on the left column to display Sub-tasks and the Assignees.

When complete, this overview dashboard will provide a quick and easy view of the scrum team’s current sprint work. It is great for reviewing before or after standup meetings, or for product owners who need to monitor specific stories.