The work item panel
What Changeline shows on a work item: its journey from created to released, and whether the release it shipped in failed. The panel is the whole of it; the Details column holds a glance.
Open it
On any work item, open Changeline from View app actions, the hexagon under the work item’s title. In the Details column, look for the Changeline group, which Jira may show closed until you open it. Every work item has one, even a work item with nothing to count yet.
The panel
It starts with one grey line of facts, with how old the figures are and Recalculate beside it:
- Shipped in Checkout 1.6 · 22 Oct, for a work item in a released version.
- Done 2 days ago, in no released version yet, for a work item that is Done and in no released version.
- In progress for 2.1 days, for one that has started and is not Done.
- Not started, for one that has never left To Do. The panel says only that, with the age and Recalculate. (A failure work item keeps its rows, below.)
- Done 3 Oct, when your Jira admin counts a deployment as a work item reaching Done.
Under it the figures are rows, each with its time and a bar, all bars on one scale so you see which stage was longest:
- Change lead time: the figure. While the work item has not shipped it says so far.
- Waiting to start: from creation to its first move out of To Do.
- In progress: from there to Done.
- Waiting for release: from Done to the release that shipped it. Not drawn when a deployment is a work item reaching Done.
- Shipped in: the release, as a link to Jira’s page for it, with its day and a green lozenge No failure or a red one, Failed. When a deployment is a work item reaching Done the row reads Deployed.
The lead time follows the rule in The five measures, and the three stages are the ones under Where the lead time goes, for this one work item.
When its release failed
An amber box says so and names what points at it, each key a link: Checkout 1.6 failed: CHK-31 points at it. Changeline looks for a failure of a type your Jira admin chose (Bug by default) in two places: a work item that names the release under Affects versions, and one that links to a work item of that release, with any link type. For the links it reads the release’s first 100 work items. When a deployment is a work item reaching Done, a failure is one linked to it and created after it was done.
Grey notes
What explains a figure is grey, under the rows, never amber:
- Never left To Do, so lead time starts when it was created.
- Released before it started: left out of the lead time.
- In several released versions: the first after it started counts.
Which release
The release is the work item’s first released version on or after the day its lead time starts, whatever that version’s release date. If every version it is in was released before it started, there is no lead time and the grey note says so.
A failure
A work item of a failure type, a Bug or an incident, shows its own journey as above, and first a row Points at: the release its Affects versions names, or the work item it links to, with counts as that release’s failure beside it (counts as that work item’s failure when a deployment is a work item reaching Done). One that points at nothing says so in grey: Points at no release, so it counts in no measure.
Then Fixed in, the release that ships its fix as a link, or Done 3 Oct when it was fixed by reaching Done, and Failed deployment recovery time, as the Failures tab counts it: its creation to the release that ships its fix, else to its Done. A failure not yet recovered has no Fixed in row, and its recovery time reads so far.
In the Details column
A glance, without opening the panel, laid out as Jira’s own Details: Change lead time with its figure (or so far), and Shipped in with the release and Failed or No failure. For a failure, Points at, Fixed in and Failed deployment recovery time come first. When the release failed, the same amber line names what points at it. Recalculate is the last line, bottom left, with the age.
The bars stay in the panel, and the column has no facts line. The grey notes are said on hover over Change lead time.
How fresh it is
The panel and the Details column read the work item as you, so they show only what you may see, and keep the answer for ten minutes per person and work item. Recalculate reads it again. See What is stored.
DORA here is the research programme at Google behind change lead time and the other four measures, not the EU’s Digital Operational Resilience Act. DORA is a trademark of Google LLC, and Changeline is not made or endorsed by Google.