Work Item Age Chart

What's going off the rails while we can still act?

The chart shows every work item that has started and is still open: how long it has been in progress (vertical axis) and which workflow stage it is in now (columns). Reference lines show how long recently finished work items took in total, so you see which open ones are already older than most finished ones were.

Which work items count

All unresolved work items from the chosen project or saved filter that have started, that is, entered a status in Jira's In Progress category at least once. Work items that never started are not shown. There is no age limit: very old work items are shown too. If a few are far older than the rest, the vertical axis ends above the others and each of them is a triangle at the top edge, labelled with its age, for example "500d". Hover over it or click it as over any dot.

How age is calculated

Age runs from the first time a work item entered an In Progress status until now, in calendar days including weekends. Going back to To Do or being reopened does not reset it. Age is calculated each time the chart loads; the "Refreshed …" line shows when that was.

Columns

From left to right. The first two columns appear only when they hold work items:

• "Returned / not in progress": work items that have started but whose current status is in Jira's To Do or Done category, for example because they were sent back.
• "Unmapped": work items whose current status is in the In Progress category but not one of your workflow stages (tooltip "⚠ In progress, but not one of your workflow stages"), and work items whose status Jira no longer knows (tooltip "⚠ Unknown status: cannot be placed").
• Your workflow stages, in the order you set.

Without workflow stages, every work item in an In Progress status lands in "Unmapped". Hover over a dot to see the work item, its status and its age.

Workflow stages

In the configuration, "Workflow stages" lists the in-progress statuses the columns follow, left to right; drag rows to reorder them. For a project you choose from that project's statuses, for a saved filter from the statuses its open work items are in. A stage whose status is no longer available for the chosen source is removed when the configuration opens.

Reference lines

The lines are cycle time percentiles, calculated as on the Cycle Time Chart page, from work items of the same source that had started and were resolved in the last N days ("Days previously", 90 by default). The header says how many finished work items the lines are based on, for example "Lines from 87 work items finished in the last 90 days". The 85th percentile line means: 85% of those work items took at most that long in total. An open work item above it has already been in progress longer than 85% of them took from start to finish. All four percentile lines are on by default; the mean is optional. When lines are close together, they share one label above the highest of them, highest value first, for example "85th: 14d 8h · 70th: 12d"; in a narrow chart, each value gets its own line in that label. In a very small widget with many reference lines there may not be room above them, and a label can then sit across other lines; show fewer lines or give the widget more room.

"Days previously" only sets the window for the reference lines; it does not change which open work items are shown. It is also independent of any Cycle Time Chart on the same dashboard, so the two can show different values for the same percentile. If no work item was finished in the window, the dots are still shown and the chart says, for example: "No work items were finished in the last 90 days, so there are no reference lines."

Settings

When the chart is empty

If no work item has started and is still open, the chart says: "No started work in flight."

Opening work items

Click a dot to open the work items at that spot. Click a column header to open every work item in that column. As on every chart, more than 300 work items cannot be opened at once.