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How to track time spent on Jira Tickets with a specific Epic


The scarcity of resources is one of the most fundamental principles in economics. From this principle, it follows that the use of resources must be well-considered. In agile project management, the most important resource is the working time of teams because only through this, tasks can be completed and client projects invoiced. It is therefore extremely important for project managers and team leaders to have an overview of this scarce resource.

The project management software Jira from Atlassian, which is very popular in agile project management, provides an extremely well-liked tool for this task: Report Builder. The Jira Reporting app provides a number of options for team leaders to create reports for the time spent by individual employees or the entire team.

This is how Report Builder is structured

With Report Builder, numerous reports can be generated and already created reports can be viewed and edited.
Choose between “Quick Reports”, with which you can quickly create reports from templates, and “Scripted Reports”, which you can customize using HTML and JavaScript.

The reports created in Report Builder, which can be grouped according to numerous criteria, help you in the following use cases, for example:

  • What is the capacity utilisation of your team?

  • How does the current productivity of your team compare to previous periods?

  • What is the relationship between users, projects, epics and time entries?

  • How many billable hours has your team booked for a specific project?

Report Builder from Actonic also provides a quick answer for the following case:

How much time did I spent on tickets with a specific Epic this month?

In this article, we will show you how Report Builder helps you to optimize your project management with Jira by means of this specific use case. We will take a closer look at the Quick Reports and illustrate the various functions of this area.

The time spent on Jira Tickets with a specific Epic – Why this information matters so much

Epics in Jira cover either an overarching goal or specific topics, which are broken down into practical duties through stories and tasks. Knowing how much time an employee or team has spent on tickets of a certain epic is an extremely important information for project managers. This is because it helps project managers to zoom out and get an overview of the different task areas in their day-to-day work with tasks. This way, the project manager can get a bigger picture of the task priorities of employees and, if necessary, redirect them. Time resources can thus be overviewed, and different time spans can be compared with each other.

The Pivot Quick Report – Just a few clicks to your Jira Time Tracking Report

1. Navigate to the “Reports” section, click on “Create Reports” and select the “Pivot Working Report” under Quick Reports.

2. Set your desired report parameters.

Here, you can make filter options according to your preferences to display the time spent on specific epics. Make the following settings to get the information you need:

a) Select the period to be used as the basis for the calculations. If you want to base the information on the past month, select “Last Month”.

b) Select your desired filters according to which the information is that should be displayed. For this, you can either use a JQL code or select different filters via “Switch to basic view” through the six dropdown menus displayed there. To display information on your last month, select your name here under “Users”.

c) Go to “Group by” and drag-and-drop your desired grouping criterion to the left. If you want to group the information according to your epics, use “Epic” as the grouping criterion here.

d) Result: You get an overview of the time you have spent on your various epics in the last month and can now analyze it and compare it with other months. You can now export the report created in this way as an Excel, CSV or PDF file or to Microsoft Teams.

As you can see, with Report Builder you can get a rich and clear report about your time spent per Epic in the last month with just a few clicks. As you can imagine, Report Builder covers many other use cases in Jira reporting.

Two more of these everyday use cases have already been covered by us in articles worth reading:

Report Builder: The all-rounder of Jira Reporting

Report Builder is the answer to thousands of use cases and therefore a real “all-rounder” in Jira Reporting. Its functions are very useful for team leads as well as for employees. For fast reports, the “Quick Reports” area offers effective solutions. The “Scripted Reports” area provides you the function to design reports via HTML and JavaScript and thus freely design them according to your wishes.
You can find more information about Report Builder on the Atlassian Marketplace, where you can test a free trial version of our app for 30 days.

Test our “all-rounder” for thirty days
for free now:

Next level Jira Reporting with Report Builder

  • Free 30-day trial
  • Create your own Jira custom reports
  • Most reliable sprint planning
Go to Atlassian Marketplace

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