One of my go to reports in JIRA is the Velocity Chart report. This report shows how much you achieve in every sprint in terms of story points, and how much you committed to. An example of a Velocity Chart is shown below:
Till recently, it was not very clear to me how JIRA was calculating commitment. I assumed that everything that has been pulled into a Sprint is considered commitment, but then in one of my sprints I noticed that there is no bar for commitment at all!
Apparently, JIRA calculates the commitment as all story points present in the sprint before the sprint starts. This means that you have to be a little careful with the sequence of activities in terms of creating a sprint, planning it and activating it etc. in for this report to be correct.
The sequence that you should follow is this:
- Close current Sprint.
- Create next Sprint.
- Pull stories in the Sprint and assign points to each story.
- Start the Sprint.
I’ve been guilty of just hitting the Start button without assigning stories and points to those stories because this nuance was not clear to me, and as a result the report was all off.
I think it makes sense to do things in the order they have prescribed because this is quite logical, but since these are just button clicks with no warnings as to how they affect reporting — it’s easy to make mistakes.
Leave a Reply