10 Questions Every Project Should Answer Using Jira Query Language

After 25 years of building software and leading project teams, I have seen only one consistent software industry trend. Everyone who decided to lead a team will be faced with the same set of questions if they will be successful at delivering. All successful projects are similar in the same way, and all failed projects are unique in their way.

The Scrum Agile Framework was born out of a common denominator of best practices that have worked. Scrum can be practiced in any format. E.g., contrast using sticky paper on walls or using the software in a purely digital form. One of the most popular agile software is Jira, developed by Atlassian.com.  which is especially helpful when managing distributed teams that require enterprise reporting and transparency to upper management.

It does not matter if you use the Capability Maturity Model (CMM), Lean, Six Sigma, Agile, Theory of Constraints, or another management methodology from PMI. Any successful Project Manager or Lead must answer some fundamental questions. These are a few that come to mind.

1. How Many Stories/Tasks were closed today/this week/month/year (achieved)

   project = "TEST" AND status = closed

2. How Many Stories/Tasks were opened today/this week? (increasing product back log or PBI is a sign of usage and value)

   project = "TEST" AND status != closed

3. What is the baseline velocity of the team to complete stories/tasks decomposed to the same complexity by day/week/month?

   project = "TEST" AND Sprint = "YourPreviousSprint"

4. What is the ratio of burn down task to the burn up task? (close to open ratio)

   Results of question1 / Results of question2

5. How many Stories/Tasks/ Story Points are we currently working on? (in scrum language: the active sprint)

   project = "TEST" AND Sprint = "YourActiveSprint"

6. What is the persons allocation to the active work? (budget), is the load balanced?

   project = "TEST" AND assignee = currentuser()

7. Do we have any slack capacity in the team? (ability to manage change and variance)

   project = "TEST" AND assignee in(member1, member2, member3)

8. What are the current risks that can impact the timeline/scope of the deliverable?

   project = "TEST" AND priority in (Blocker, Critical)

9. Did we get any daily/weekly feedback?

   project = "TEST" AND assignee is EMPTY and updatedDate < -1d

10. How much inter group dependencies and coordination are involved (meetings with different teams)?

    OK Jira cannot answer this one. Lol

To get the command line for the Jira Query Language (JQL) do the following:

• Click Issues > Search for issue
• Click Edit (If you have a search in progress)
• Click Advanced Searching

Advance Design Tip: you can stack filters for high impact with little changes on all dashboards that use the filter. eg

filter= "MY FILTER" AND assignee is EMPTY and updatedDate < -1d

for more great functions check out this site

It is important to note that these questions are crystallized in the crucible of critical first principles:

1. 1. Trust takes time to build and is easily lost. We can have a fixed timeline or a fixed scope, but we cannot remain fixed on both and still maintain trust. Sometimes we get what we need but not what we want.
   2. Metric Questions above are NOT meant to weaponize management but serve as a north star about how a team works and its capability to deliver. Management must trust the team to do its job.
   3. From the Outside In.  The ability to estimate and deliver value is still driven from the outside, where the customer defines value. 

Stephen Choo Quan

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