Tracking "flagged time" in Jira

Some weeks ago I talked about why Why You Should Ditch the "Blocked" Column in Kanban. Ronaldo Neves highlighted that one of the few downsides of it was that Jira did not offer a way to measure the flagged item cycle time from the beginning thru the end of it. Well...

In short, to track flagged time you’ll need to be a jira admin rights (to create custom fields) and to:

• Create a Datetime Custom Field “Flagged Start Time”
• Create a number Custom Field “Flagged Duration in Minutes”
• Create an automation that will either set the moment the item is flagged or tell you when the item is unflagged.

The bulk of the work is setting the automation, specially on the smart values formulas around it. I'm happy to explain what these smart values mean, if there's anyone interested.

The workflow goes like this: once an item is flagged, time starts to count. Once item is unflagged, flagged total time is stored in a variable and an (optional) comment is added saying for how long this item was blocked. If the item is blocked again, these minutes will be summed up and shown again once unflagged. You'll be able to see things like...

The automation will look like this:

Step 1 - (when) Track any changes for the “flagged” item?

<if path>

Step 2 - (condition) If Flagged Start Time is Empty

Step 3 - (then) Set Flagged Start Time as

{{now}}        

<(else path>

Step 4 - (then) Set Flagged Duration in Minutes as?

{{#=}}{{issue.Flagged Duration in Minutes}}+{{now.diff(issue.Flagged Start Time).minutes.abs}}{{/}}        

Optional Step 5 - (then) Add comment to issue as

The issue has been flagged for {{issue.Flagged Start Time.diff(now.plusMinutes(if(exists(issue.Flagged Duration in Minutes),issue.Flagged Duration in Minutes,0)))}}.        

Step 6 - (then) Clear Flagged Start Time value setting it to an empty value.

If you did an automation with the above steps, it might look like this:

If this helps at least one team ditching the "blocked" column, then this post was a success.

And let me know if that's the case by commenting here!