Building Jira Dashboard - Naive To Ninja

Builing JIRA Dashboard is such an easy task and anybody can be Naive to Nijna in just 1 hours. If you are part of Agile Team, you must have a JIRA dashboard to get project insight. It does not matter that you have to be a Product Onwer or Scrum Master to create a dashboard, as long as you have access to the Agile Project, you can simply build your JIRA dashboard at no time. Having JIRA dashboard running in your project is not a great thing. Having right gadgets on your dashboard and paying attention to those numbers make you Nijna. JIRA dashboard allows you to add different gadget available in JIRA market place (similar to mobile apps) and you can arrange them as you wish. Each gadget serves a different purpose and has applicability based on nature of project (SCRUM or Kanban etc). So lets start how to create your first dashboard and different gadgets for your project.

Step 1 : Create Dashboard Screen First

Logon to your JIRA application and chose “Manager Dashboards” from “Dashboards” menu. On clicking, a new script will come up which will allow you to provide dashboard names and other important information.

Initiate JIRA Dashboard

Initiate JIRA Dashboard

Input dashboard name & description. “Start From” is an interesting one and if you have access to other projects in your team or company, you can simply copy it or start as fresh using blank dashboard. You can also choose this dashboard as favorit and share with other groups in your company (like your delivery owner or PMO teams).

Create JIRA Dashboard

If you have created a blank JIRA Dashboard, then nothing will come and you need to go to gadget button and search and pull those gadgets. If you have copied from other projects, it will automatically come and will be available for customisation. When you copy or start-from an existing dashboard, they copy all the properties from other projects and you have to edit each gadget to apply for your project.

Basic Dashboard Layout

Step 2 : Add your First Gadget to JIRA Dashboard

Hit the “Add gadget” button to load all the gadget and you need to pay attention to following items

  1. Search box : Allows you to search for a particular gadget. If you know the name or any text about gadget, you can quickly search and find it.
  2. Categories : Each gadget is classified under a category based on their purpose, you can click them and see only those which belong to that category.
  3. Add gadget : This button allows you to add the gadget in your JIRA Dashboard.
  4. Load All gadgets : Sometime you may find an error saying that you have additional gadgets and by clicking on the link, all the gadgets will be loaded.
  5. Show XML Link : This is just a xml link can be copied to add the plugin from URL directly.

This screen does not give a clear guidance and overview about gadget and you have to play with it. Gadget Title , Category, thumbnail image and brief description are the only information available for you to decide. You must know what you need and you should be able to correlated which one will server the purpose.

Once they rae add

What is System Dashboard

When you create a dashboard and you chose “System Dashboard” to create a dashboard copy, a standard dashboard comes which includes primarily 3 gadgets called “Introduction” , “Assigned to Me” & “Activity Stream”.

These gadgets are also available in your gadget and you can add and configure as needed.

System Dashboard