Epic progress report

This example describes how to utilize the “velocity chart” functionality in Broken Build’s apps to plan, track progress, and improve the delivery of epics.

These Jira apps enable you to create velocity charts as Jira Dashboard gadgets:

• Velocity Charts
• Agile Reports

Velocity report for epic progress tracking

Accomplish the following goals by building a velocity chart for one or multiple teams delivering an epic:

1. Capacity allocation - prioritize your efforts by defining the percentage of sprints' scope allocated to working on a particular epic.
2. Track progress - use the say-do ratio for an epic to check whether it is progressing as expected toward its competition. Quickly check scope changes and bottlenecks to analyze how they affect the delivery.
3. Spot distractions - by focusing on an epic and allocating the capacity for it, you want this epic to be a priority. Spot what other work prevents your team (or teams) from meeting the delivery targets for the epic.

Configure velocity chart to track epics

Let’s say we want to focus on an epic called ”Epic Alpha 2”. To plan and track this epic, it’s best to set up a Jira Dashboard with two velocity charts side-by-side:

• On the left chart, we see velocity metrics broken down by epics - this allows us to compare the time spent on the epic in focus versus the time spent on others.
• On the right chart, we see the velocity chart specifically filtered by our focus epic.

Let’s check the necessary settings for these charts respectively:

Set capacity allocation for an epic

Capacity allocation is your go-to tool if you want to move the needle. Use the target lines feature to allocate capacity for the desired epic:

In the settings above, we choose the relative type of target line (#1) - we plan to allocate 50% (#3) of the sprint’s planned scope (#2 - “Initial commitment” metric).

Let’s check what our “50% capacity allocation” target line looks like on the velocity chart:

On the chart, we look at the details of Sprint 3:

• We see that in this sprint, the planned scope (“Initial commitment” metric) for “Epic Alpha 2” is just 7 story points (SPs).
• However, target line (#2) shows that 14.5 SPs should have been planned during sprint planning to meet the needed 50% capacity allocation.

Overall, we see the issue of not meeting the needed 50% capacity allocation in all sprints except Sprint 5.

You may choose to see a percentage-based velocity chart as it may be better suited for tracking whether the team meets capacity allocation:

Track epic progress

With 10 sprint metrics on the velocity chart filtered by the epic, you’ll get a comprehensive picture of a team’s (or multiple teams') progress toward the epic completion:

Note the green dashed line on the chart - this is the 2-sprint moving average for the “Completed work” metric for the specific epic:

Spot distractions to improve epic delivery

Use breakdowns by any Jira field to slice-and-dice your sprint data and, therefore, spot what distracts your teams from delivering epic in focus:

In sprint 3, the team planned a lot of other less important work; however, they should have focused 50% of their capacity on “Epic Alpha 2”.

Apps used in this example

Use our examples to build your use cases on the Jira Dashboard with these apps:

• Velocity Charts
• Agile Reports

Both apps used in these examples have a 30-day free trial and are completely free for teams under 10 people.