What is JIRA?

Software development is a cycle of defining requirements, building a system, and then validating that the system meets those requirements. If you have ever worked on a software project, you know that it’s not enough for development teams to just rely on the customer’s prototypes or specifications when constructing their system. There are often ambiguities in the design or lingering doubts about features’ feasibility and effectiveness.

JIRA is an open-source project management system that helps software development teams organize their work into issues, better prioritize them, and assign tasks to team members so that everyone has a clear idea of what they are working on. You can use jira analytics to monitor your software development project. In fact, there are several ways you can extract information from JIRA. 

For now, let us now see into 4 key JIRA metrics commonly used.

• Velocity

Velocity is the total number of issues closed per time period or amount of work completed during a sprint. Ideally, this figure should be increasing consistently, which indicates that the team is getting better at its work. You can also use velocity as a comparative metric for comparing the latest and previous periods to assess how your team is doing over time.

• Epic and release burndown

The epic burndown metric calculates the amount of work (in hours) remaining per epic over time. This metric is useful for identifying issues that are taking too long to complete, which might indicate that something is wrong with the planning process or communication in the team.

The release burndown tracks the total number of issues in each release broken down by status (e.g. open, planned, etc.). This metric is useful for determining how your team is doing in terms of meeting its target dates.

• Defects

Defects are the number of defects created by the development team. They are bad and expensive. Therefore, it’s important to track them carefully and eliminate them as quickly as possible. Defects are an important measure. They are a measure of the quality of work and the responsiveness of the team to any issues.

• Release and deployment frequency

Release and deployment frequency is the number of releases and deployments your software has undergone over a period of time. Ideally, you want to see an upward trend in this figure. This indicates that the software is improving rapidly, which is a good thing. If more releases and deployments are happening more often, any potential problems will get caught quickly and fixed before they become a big issue.