This week’s release of Time in Status Cloud introduces the option to select your denominator while calculating averages.
Up until this release, Time in Status only calculated averages by getting the sum of values in a column and dividing it by the number of non-empty values in that column. For example for an InProgress column in a Status Duration report, this would give the average InProgress time of all issues that visited the InProgress status. The issues that did not visit the InProgress status were kept out of the calculation altogether.
This presented a problem for some customer use cases. Some of our customers needed a report where the value of any issues that did not visit a status would be considered as zero and the total value of the column would be divided by the total number of issues in that column, rather than just the number of non-empty values.
This type of calculation makes sense based on your workflow and the business rules that apply to that workflow.
For example, consider a simple Open → InProgress → Resolved → Closed workflow. Most issues will go through all steps in this workflow. But to speed things up, you add a transition from Open directly to Resolved so that issues that are resolved very very quickly can be resolved with one less transition. In this case, ignoring the issues that didn’t visit the InProgress status will increase your average InProgress time so you want them to be considered as zero.
On the other hand, consider a report where you have different issue types and some statuses are usable in the workflow of only some of the issue types. In that case, dividing the total of a column by the total issue count will produce an inaccurate result since some of the issues have no way of visiting a status.
As I said, the correct selection depends on your business case.
Long story short, we introduced an option to make this selection. The new Average Denominator selection allows you to get averages for only issues with NON-EMPTY values or for ALL ISSUES.
This selection is available in the main reporting page, gadgets and REST API.
You can find the details about Average Denominator selection here.
As always, for any questions or suggestions, you can reach us through plugin@obss.com.tr or pluginsupport.obss.com.tr.
