Find out where your issues are actually waiting

Most issues don’t go straight from to do to done. They wait to be specified, sit in review, and queue up for QA. When a single work item passes through many steps and several people, it gets hard to tell which of those steps is slowing everything down.

The new status view under issue metrics shows how much time your issues spend in each phase of the cycle. For every status in your workflow, you can look at the average, median, and percentile time issues spent there.

Breaking down an issue’s cycle time this way can uncover the real bottlenecks. Development work might be completed quickly, but a small QA team means finished work waits days before anyone picks it up. Or your high-priority bugs turn out to be slow to specify, while the development itself moves fast. In both cases, the fix has nothing to do with how quickly people produce code.

The status view is most useful if your issue tracker workflows have a lot of steps, especially ones that hand work between people.

To get started, navigate to issue metrics: status. The view is available to organizations using Jira.