Overview
Understanding how tickets move through your workflow helps you monitor progress in real time and quickly identify bottlenecks and areas for improvement.
An example of a bottleneck appearing in the metric would be one of the status bars growing overtime, the image below could suggest their is a delay getting work into development.
Cumulative flow provides you with the same level of detail as a burn down in that you can see how much work is 'Done', but you can also see the journey your work is taking from creation to completion. In addition, you can track an increase/decrease in the scope by seeing how each of the vertical bars grow or shrink over time.
Many teams only use burn down charts as they focus on what you're completing (too often towards the end of sprints) but this can be somewhat limiting as they don't provide enough granular information to help you avoid problems before they impact your delivery.
The metric is calculated by taking a snapshot of your 'in-flight' tickets and the status they're in at the end of each Day/Week/Month (depending on the time granularity you select in the Date Picker). It's similar to a standard 'Cumulative Flow', but provides a breakdown at a weekly or daily level so you can pinpoint exactly where things may be going off course.
Use Case
The default version of this metric gives you insight in to your workflow as mentioned above, but it can be adapted in to 3 core metrics being sprint flow, release flow and backlog health all of which should be at the heart of your delivery. These enable you to track how a sprint, release and project or some other defined scope of work is progressing again highlighting potential areas for improvement.
See below for how to configure the metric to provide sprint flow, release/fix version flow and backlog health.
Sprint Flow - see a daily breakdown of how your work progresses over the sprint
Release/Fix Version Flow - track progress against a specific release or fix version
Backlog Health - focus on your pre-development statuses to understand the general health of your backlog
Setup
In Plandek when this default metric is applied to your dashboard it will show you where all of your unresolved tickets within the given time range sit.
Sprint Flow:
1) Click add a metric in the top right by the date picker. Under Delivery, select Cumulative Flow and add it to your dashboard.
2) Once it's on your dashboard, open the metric by clicking 'explore'.
3) Next, you can use the filters to remove any unwanted data. For example, if you only want to look at bugs, stories and tasks, then you can select the issue type filter and then select only those issue types that are meaningful for you and your team.
4) In the sprint override section below filters, select which sprint you want to look at.
5) Click save and the chart will refresh showing you a sprint flow for your chosen sprint and the other filters you selected.
In the example above, you can see a daily breakdown of how your work progresses over the sprint.
If you hover over a bar, you will see a breakdown of how many tickets were under each status, and click the number to drill down into the data.
Release / Fix version flow
Cumulative flow can be used to track progress against a specific release or fix version, which is very popular with teams and programmes who are very release or project oriented.
1) Click add a metric in the top right by the date picker. Under Delivery, select Cumulative Flow and add it to your dashboard.
2) Once it's on your dashboard, open the metric by clicking 'explore'.
3) You will need to use the Filters to apply the right view of data. Most commonly, teams and programmes use a fix version, but you can use any field from Jira, including custom fields. If you don't see the field in the drop down, contact us and we can add it for you.
4) Click Save and you will see the chart refreshing based on your filter options.
Backlog Health
Cumulative flow can be used to focus on your pre-development statuses to understand the general health of the backlog and how long the runway for delivery currently is.
Backlog Health showing story points moving from Open -> To Be Refined -> To Do
1) Click add a metric in the top right by the date picker. Under Delivery, select Cumulative Flow and add it to your dashboard.
2) Once it's on your dashboard, open the metric by clicking 'explore'.
3) You will need to use the Filters to apply the right view of data. You want to choose "status" and then select the specific values that relate to your backlog. ie. before development starts.
4) Click Save and you will see the chart refreshes reflecting your filtered statuses.
Further breakdowns and filtering are also available.
Any questions please reach out to our customer success team via the chat icon in the bottom right.