JIRA Backlog Health Report

The Jira Backlog Health Report is a nice and simple tool that can help generate insights into your own backlog. The tooling can be used to also ask questions such as all the tickets that were last touched (updated) more than 12 weeks ago, is it still relevant?

Ingredients

• Jira
• a Dashboard
• a Filter

Prerequisites

Below are two prerequisites for this Backlog Health Report:

• A Jira Dashboard
• A Jira Filter saved that already shows “all” issues for your team, this can be achieved by just saving a filter with the component for your team selected.

You can copy and paste the below into an advanced search and then save the filter:

project = XXX

Permissions

By default Jira saves Filters and Dashboards as “private”, meaning it’s only visible to you. If you want to share this with other you need to make sure all filters and dashboards utilised have the permissions set correctly. if in doubt please let me know

Creating the Health Report

To create the health report you just need to insert a single gadget onto your newly created Jira Dashboard and then tweak the configuration to have it display the results as shown below:

To create the above you need to do the following:

1. Once your new dashboard has loaded, click on “Add Gadget” on the top right

1. In the new pop-up, look for the gadget with the name “Filter counts”

1. Click on “Add Gadget”
2. Click on “Close” on the Gadget Library window
3. There will be some new options on the dashboard, click on “Advanced Search” under the Project/Saved Filter section

1. In the new pop-up click on the filter (click on the name) you created in the Prerequisites
2. Click on the check box to make the gadget update every 15 minutes (shown in the above picture)
3. Follow the below steps for creating the various indicators

Add “Status – Open”

1. Slick on the dropdown box under “Counts:”
2. Click on “Build Custom Count”
3. In the new pop-up, give the custom count the name “Status -Open”
4. In the Criteria, type the following: status = open
5. Tick on the “Show the count as..”
6. Set the settings that make sense for your team (below is an example)

Add “High & Highest Priority Tickets”

1. Click on the dropdown box under “Counts:”
2. Click on “Build Custom Count”
3. In the new pop-up, give the custom count the name “High & Highest Priority Tickets in Backlog”
4. In the Criteria, type the following: status = Open and priority in (High, Highest)
5. Tick on the “Show the count as..”
6. Set the settings that make sense for your team (below is an example)

Add “Last Updated: < 4 Weeks”

1. Click on the dropdown box under “Counts:”
2. Click on “Build Custom Count”
3. In the new pop-up, give the custom count the name “Last Updated: < 4 Weeks”
4. In the Criteria, type the following: status = open AND Updated. > -4w
5. Tick on the “Show the count as..”
6. Set the settings that make sense for your team (below is an example)

Add “Last Updated: 8 – 12 Weeks”

1. Click on the dropdown box under “Counts:”
2. Click on “Build Custom Count”
3. In the new pop-up, give the custom count the name “Last Updated: 8 – 12 Weeks”
4. In the Criteria, type the following: status = open AND updated >= -12w AND updated <= -8w
5. Tick on the “Show the count as..”
6. Set the settings that make sense for your team (below is an example)

Add “Last Updated: 12+ Weeks”

1. Click on the dropdown box under “Counts:”
2. Click on “Build Custom Count”
3. In the new pop-up, give the custom count the name “Last Updated: 12+ Weeks”
4. In the Criteria, type the following: status = open AND updated <= -12w
5. Tick on the “Show the count as..”
6. Set the settings that make sense for your team (below is an example)

1. Click on “Save”
2. Woot! You have done