Boost your Jira Boards with JMCF calculated fields

In Jira, you can customize your Board cards to help users focus on important details. You can filter according to your preferences, change colors, and display up to three fields. Adding a field you already have available in Jira is not difficult. However, you often want to show information not stored in an issue field, or pull it from a related issue.

For example, you might want to:

• Display data from a parent issue;
• Concatenate data from multiple fields;
• Display who made the last change;
• Show who executed a particular transition and when;
• Calculate how long the issue remained in the status (we show how in the video below).

You can easily do all that and so much more by creating calculated custom fields with Jira Misc Custom Fields (JMCF) and adding them to your Board's card view. 

Customize your Jira Board with "Time in Status" custom field

Let's work with this example: in a Kanban Board, let's show how long issues have remained in columns to prevent any of them from lingering beyond the acceptable time frame. To do so, we need to calculate and display the time-in-status for one or more statuses.

How-to: 

Create a field by navigating to "Custom Fields" > "Add Custom Field". Proceed to the Advanced taband select "Time in Status Field (JMCF app)".

Next, give the name to the field (and you might also want to provide more details in an optional description field). Then, associate the field to the appropriate screen(s). 

1: There are multiple attributes you can configure in this Time in Status field, but what you must do is to configure statuses. If you select "current status", you'll be able to see the time spent in the status the issue is currently in. You can select as many statuses as you need, but at least one option is required.

2: If at any time you find yourself in need of help, you can find useful links on each JMCF configuration page - either on top or on the right side. 

Then, add the field to your Board(s) (up to three fields can be added to each board). The fields can be different for the Backlog and Active sprints - if you are using a Scrum board - which gives you a bit more flexibility.

To add fields to cards, select the appropriate Board, and select "Configure". 

Now your Board's cards and screens will look something like this: 

To learn more on how to set up the Time in Status custom field type, visit this documentation page.

Here are some of the fan favorites that can truly help in improving your Boards:

• Display the number of times a particular transition has been executed. For example, if an issue was rejected by QA multiple times, it can be useful to identify problems at a glance.
• Display the sum of the story points for the issue and all its subtasks.
• Display the author and the date of the last comment.

Review this list of use cases for the custom fields provided with JMCF to see what else you can make easily available to your users.