The Agile Development Process lets development teams move quickly. That speed provides a challenge for management: how do you keep on top of your team’s progress and quickly clear blocks?

Beyond stand-up meetings, slack messages, and constant emails, you can use Explore Analytics reporting to get a clear picture on where your team is at and where it is heading by building a Cumulative Flow Diagram.

What is a Cumulative Flow Diagram?

Cumulative Flow Diagrams (similar to “burn up charts”) are stacked area charts that show the amount of work in any state, such as work completed or in various stages of progress. At each point in time, you can see how many tasks were in each state. As more tasks get added, the area gets larger.

For example, in this chart you can see that our Alpha Release has a typical flow: from day to day, more tasks are being authored and pushed through the development process:

Authenticated users can drill through to the individual records themselves to take action and see specific updates. This powerful feature provides seamless transitions from looking at the overall picture to taking action.

What can you learn from it?

Cumulative Flow Diagrams are great for identifying blocks in the seamless flow of your development cycle.

Here, you can see our Beta release is running into a problem – the tasks marked “ready for testing” are growing faster than the other segments:

That indicates there’s a process block, where items are being developed faster than they can be tested.

Where’s the block in the process? Try clicking “Testing” in the legend and selecting “Keep Only Testing.” By focusing your view on just that one state, it’s easier to see that testing is not moving forward in a seamless way. Now, as a manager, you can focus on the block in the progress and see what you can do to get back on track.

For another example, you can see that our Gamma release has the problem that way too many tasks are being marked “Ready” at the start of our process, and we can’t keep up:

Again, now we know the bottleneck in the process, and we can shift staff or redefine scope to better meet our goals and expectations.

Get Started Today – Build your Cumulative Flow Diagram Now!

Under the hood, to get a Cumulative Flow Diagram is easy with Explore Analytics. All you need to do is create a real-time report of tasks by state, then schedule a “Track Trend” to capture and track the changes over time.

Want to see more detail? This video walks through building the report from end-to-end:

Within minutes you will be on your way to real-time visibility into how your development is progressing.