[scott_w]

This is a huge thing. Also, if Jira doesn’t directly support your specific workflow, the API and Export functions provide a lot of information to do this for you.

This reporting gets useful once you have a stable team and you want to identify issues in your process and back your theories up with data.

Let’s say you struggle to meet expected delivery dates (based off estimates), have a look at a chart of your cycle times. Do they take longer than a week, with a wide variance in when they get delivered? Maybe you’re not breaking down work enough, or you’re getting blocked (committed too early).

Check a chart of the number of tickets in each status every day, that might tell you that things get backed up waiting for review or deployment, so discuss that.

Simpler tools don’t really provide this information. Is it always necessary? On greenfield work with a smaller company, almost certainly not, but as your product and company gets more complex, having access to this, and presenting it to your team, gets more valuable.