One of my favorite Jira gadgets is also one of the most overlooked. The name’s a mouthful, but the Two-Dimensional Filter Statistics gadget is a must-have for any great Jira dashboard.

This gadget lets you view a summary of issue counts broken down across two axes, which you pick from any field you use in Jira. Read on as we walk through a few examples – your eyes will be opened to the awesome power this gadget provides!

Watch Work In-Flight

Most days, I have several issues that I’m waiting on other teams and departments to address. To keep a handle on everything I’m waiting on, I’ve set up a filter to show all the issues I’ve reported that have not been resolved yet, and I display them by Assignee and Status. This gives me an idea of when to expect items coming my way, and let’s me easily see if there’s a particular person I need to chase up.

resolution is EMPTY AND reporter = currentUser()
reported-by-me

Sort Scheduled Items

Atlassian Blogs is organized by three separate teams, so it can be difficult to know who is working on what, and when. This gadget provides that clarity. It lets all three teams see which topics need more coverage, and lets team leads and managers keep an eye out for bottlenecks to ensure we’re spreading work across all categories.

We track all kinds of work items in Jira, including blog posts. The example at right shows issues of the type ‘Blog Post’ that have a publish date. This serves as a quick reference point to see which blogs have content in progress, and how close those pieces of content are to being published.scheduled blogs two dimensional

issuetype = "Blog Idea"
  AND status != "MKT - Published"
  AND "Publish Date" is not EMPTY

 

How do you categorize work? by Component? You can set up something like this to track progress of any items by category! The left column is a field we’ve set up on the Blog Idea issue type. The power of the Two Dimensional Filter Statistics gadget is that you can have the rows and columns show any field you’re using in Jira.

Keep an eye on triage

Jira development organizes into several sub-teams that each focus on a different “Theme” as we work toward release milestones. This example shows a breakdown of work across upcoming project milestones.

project = JRADEV AND type = story AND status != done AND fixVersion is EMPTY

two-dimensional-story-triage

Product Managers and Theme Leads are expected to categorize these issues, and our Project Manager helps everyone ensure this gets done – in her ideal world, this table would be full of zeros!

What will you break down?

The power of this gadget isn’t just in the data it provides, but in the structure you choose and the visibility you gain over projects across your organization. Powerful dashboards built with gadgets like this one is one of the reasons thousands of teams rely on Jira as their project management software of choice.

Have you seen a creative use of the Two Dimensional Filter Statistics gadget? Post a comment below.

Managers, meet your new favorite gadget