Use this chart to...
- Visualise the behaviour of the overall system over time.
- Highlight the location of queues or bottlenecks in the system as well as highlighting where there is too much work in progress. (WIP)
What the chart shows...
- Looking back it is possible to see where the team had too much WIP, where bottlenecks exist as work flows across the board.
- Advanced techniques can be used to estimate the lead time of work - i.e. how long a piece of work takes to go across the 'in progress' states
- You can focus on the amount of WIP in a single state, like 'In development' over time, which is useful to see if the trend is in the right direction - where lower WIP is better.
- A lot of insight that can be derived from the CFD and Pawel Brodzinski provides a good summary of how to interpret a CFD
Select data
Narrow down your search with the Projects, Versions, Sprints, Component and Labels fields.
You will also need to decide which Issue types you want to include in the CFD - this would normally be Stories and Bugs. issues like features, tasks etc. would NOT be included in a CFD
The hit load - enter a chart name if you want to save it.
Chart Settings
| Setting | Description |
|---|---|
| Data Interval (days) | Set this to the frequency you want the history to be sampled and the datapoint appear on the chart. |
| Dates | Select the start date of the chart - the end date will always go up until 'Today' |
| Hide and Apply Chart settings | This will first do a refresh of the data based on any changes you have made before hiding the data selection panel |
| Hide | Hides the data selection panel without making new query to the database |
Chart Display
| Setting | Description |
|---|---|
| Hide/Show Title Data | Toggles between hiding or showing the title data box. This can be useful if you are copying the image to a presentation and want to see what parameters were set to create the chart. |
Interpreting the chart
The chart shows the behaviour of the system over time. The columns / states are read from the team's JIRA board. The vertical width of the coloured band shows how many items or effort is held in that band - generally this should be narrower and parallel. See above for more on how to interpret CFDs.
See Work in Progress in a specific state over time
Unlike most CFDs you can choose to look at the WIP (work in progress) in a specific column on the board.
Selecting 'Ready of Dev' 
we can see a steady increase in the amount of work in this column on the board. Eventually this reached 500 points of effort 
in that state. Suggesting that work got stuck waiting to go into development.
Drill into the details
Click on a blob on the chart to see the items that make are within it. Click on the link to open it in JIRA
Sort the data by clicking on the column header 
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