Issue Dependency Reports to Find Bottlenecks

Issue dependency reports show the relationship of any given issue with other linked tasks to easily pinpoint potential bottlenecks.

Organizations need to understand dependencies to help with the planning and tracking of projects. In product roadmaps, dependencies can help plan a timeline for feature release. For velocity reports, knowing dependencies can help explain why a team may be slower than expected.

In Scrum, when planning, dependencies drive the work that will be done. This also applies to PI planning in SAFe^®. Without an easy to read issue dependency report, these events cannot be easily done.

VisualScript can create a report that shows dependencies for any selected single issue. That issue can be any type (feature, initiative, story, bug, or task).

The report is generated using the blocks link type built into Jira. If that link exists between two issues, the report will show that dependency.

The goal of this report is to answer specific questions related to issues and supplement other reports teams will be using. It allows the team to dig deeper and answer many common "why" questions that tend to arise during development.

For example, a team may start by looking at a PI board and then when the questions arise about a single issue, VisualScript's issue dependency report will step in to answer them.

VisualScript's issue dependency report will answer questions like:

• Why is this feature not ready for deployment?
• Why are we off schedule from our plan?
• Why is our velocity low?

VisualScript is also fully customizable so you can easily customize and tweak the built-in issue dependency report to match your needs.

To generate an Issue Dependency Report using VisualScript, you'll need VisualScript installed on your Jira instance. Once VisualScript is added to your instance, you can add a VisualScript gadget to your dashboard. When the VisualScript gadget is added to a dashboard, you'll see a list of available reports to run. The built-in reports will be in a folder called "Built-In Reports".

Choose "Jira Issue Dependency" to add to your dashboard.

You'll be asked to provide an issue key and a link name. By default, "blocks" will be selected.

The report will show which Epic the issue belongs to and show all the issues blocked by the selected issue and all the issues blocking the selected issue.

You'll notice there are colored dots in the lower left corner of each issue to represent their status: to do is blue, in progress is yellow, and done is green.

You can also click through to the specific issues in Jira.

The issue dependency report makes a good complimentary report to PI planning and other reports to provide much needed detail.

You can easily customize it further to meet your organization's specific needs.

While VisualScript offers a turn-key, no-code solution that will work out of the box for many teams, you can also easily make adjustments to create a custom report.

VisualScript comes with a built-in SDK that makes it easy to generate custom reports that fit your teams' needs.

If you're an administrator, you can use the Report Builder to edit features of the report. You can choose parameters to change the options users will see in the UI of the report Or use the Code Editor to customize every detail of the look of the report like shape size, spacing and arrangement. We even have friendly engineers who will help you get started.