Introduction
Much of the time, we focus on tracking issue and story status, but don’t pay much attention to — or simply can’t — measure the progress of epics. Keeping the status of your epics always on your radar will improve your results. It allows greater visibility into your workload, enabling more efficient planning and delivery.
Want to find out how to view the progress of your epics in your Jira dashboards? Here’s how!
How to report Epic Progress on Jira dashboards natively
There are some out-of-the-box ways in which Jira can provide insights on this.
There’s an Atlassian tutorial on YouTube on how to create Jira Epic Reports individually, i.e., epic by epic reporting. But if what you want is to add this metric to a dashboard, there is a way to do it. Create and save a JQL filter to fetch the list of epics for a given project and then, on a new dashboard, apply this filter to a gadget. It isn’t easy, but at least it’s possible (to some degree).
As you can see, it isn’t easy to have a Jira dashboard that shows the epic progress. If you really need to report on the status of your epics, we suggest voting for existing issues that request this feature to be implemented in Jira. Of course, there’s no guarantee Atlassian will address this in the future.
But we have good news. There is a way to create dashboards that track all the epics and show the progress bar for each epic. Keep reading!
Meet the powerful Epic Progress gadget
There is an Epic Progress gadget, and it’s available thanks to Dashboard Hub Pro. This gadget displays the progression in the completion of a particular group of epics by different estimation statistics. Get the insights you need with a well-designed user interface and great customization.
See how the Epic Progress gadget looks and feels in this live Agile dashboard. This gadget (like the entire list of nearly 100 Dashboard Hub gadgets) is also compatible with native Jira dashboards.
This gadget is one of our Top 10 gadgets for Agile dashboards: get the complete list.
If you need to display the progress of all epics for your projects or portfolio, the Epic Progress gadget also includes a “List View.” All the key information is still available with lean design.
Dashboard Hub Pro is a business intelligence and reporting app that upgrades Jira dashboards with easy JQL custom chart creation, plenty of powerful metrics, pre-built templates, integrations, and effortless external share (Check out an actual use case).
Pro tip: There’s a free 30-day trial that you can use to try the Epic progress gadget and nearly 100 more gadgets — then report on them with external report sharing!
You can also report on Epic Progress in Confluence pages with Dashboard Hub for Confluence! This is how embedding the Epic Progress gadget looks:
Conclusion
If you don’t mind putting in some extra effort, there are ways to display the status of epics individually in your native dashboards. But if you need to report on several epics — and prefer comfort and efficiency — we strongly suggest tracking a sprint for free with the Epic Progress gadget in Dashboard Hub for Jira. You’ll fall in love with it.
Get startedUpdate: The Epic Progress gadget has been renamed to "Progress Tracker" and now allows additional levels in the issue hierarchy: Epics, Themes, Initiatives or any other issue type that can hold children issues to track their progress. Read more here.