Monitor your current work in progress. Evaluate your individual issues in progress. Oversee the state of your process in the past.
Use the Aging Chart for ZenHub to track your current issues in progress. It uses the same visual format as your ZenHub board, with each column representing an existing pipeline in your workflow. The Aging Chart for ZenHub shows how many days an issue has already spent in progress.
The Aging Chart for ZenHub helps you gauge which areas of your process are hindering your delivery performance. A large group of dots notifies you that there is too much work in progress in a certain state.
On the Aging Chart, you will be able to see the number of issues in progress currently available in each pipeline on your ZenHub board.
Ensure the number of work items doesn’t exceed the WIP limit for each process state. Stick to your WIP limits, as this is an essential part of achieving a faster delivery time, while also boosting your team’s productivity.
By clicking on each dot, you will be able to gain a more detailed summary of your work items in progress, including information surrounding the issue type and a direct link to it in ZenHub. You can also use this feature to evaluate the amounts of time the issue has spent in each process state.
Issues on the same pipeline and with the same WIP age will be plotted together. Click on the dot to expand the list of issues and analyze them individually.
The Aging Chart for ZenHub allows you to change your basis date. By evaluating what your process looked like on a certain date in the past, you can go back and assess how your work items have advanced back then.
We recommend using that feature during your retrospectives, in order to assess opportunities for improvement.
Your Aging Chart’s percentile lines represent your past performance and show the cycle times that your previous work has taken to complete.
While your issues are still kept within the percentiles you use to define your service level agreements, you are meeting your deadlines. In the instance that, for example, you’ve committed to the 85th percentile and you notice that your work item just moved to the orange zone crossing the 70th percentile, don’t cut from the scope or rush the implementation. Don’t sacrifice the quality of your work to be able to deliver it on time. Instead, expedite your work.
The colored health zones plot how your previous issues advanced throughout each of your process states. For example, the green zone shows the times that half of the issues spent in each state.
Observe how your current work is moving through the zones in order to improve your chances of meeting your commitments. The higher a dot, the more likely that it will be delayed. We suggest taking a closer look at any issues that shift into the yellow zone. These issues have already spent more time in your process than half of the work items completed to date.
The WIP widget displays the number of issues in progress on a given date, alongside how your WIP trends have developed over time. Hover over the line chart to observe the number of issues in progress for each date within the selected period.
Maintaining a stable system is defined by two main factors - your work in progress and your average age of work in progress. For these two metrics, consistency is the crux of the matter – stable systems are defined by keeping both your WIP and the average age of your WIP consistent. A stable your delivery workflow translates into more predictable results.
The ‘Average Age of WIP’ widget shows the average age of all work items in progress on a selected date. It also helps you monitor how your WIP age trends have built over time. If the average age of your WIP on a daily basis remains consistent, then its trendline will be linear; neither increasing nor decreasing. This means that you’re maintaining a stable system.
The metrics of the average age of WIP and cycle time are essentially the same, only while cycle time is measured against completed issues, the age of an issue is used to measure issues that are still in progress.