Grouping activity on the Work Log view

Swarmia's Work log can give you the most holistic picture to your work in progress. In this article we explain how activity gets grouped on the Work Log.

Grouping by issue tracker issues 

The controls on the top of the Work Log page give you flexibility into how you want to group the activity on the Work Log. The selection of how you choose to group your work will affect what you see on the left side as rows and what work activity will get grouped on each row. In this example we are grouping work by Issues and more specifically by epics. This is why we see all of the epics which had some linked activity during the visible time period.

The controls on the bottom allow you to select what type of activity to have visible on the Work Log. In the screenshot above we have selected to view commits, pull requests and issue completions.   

With epics selected as the grouping and commits, pull requests and issue completions selected as the visible activity, we are grouping all the work which has a link to any epic under them. For Jira issues this means child issues and for pull requests and commits this means a direct link to the epic or any child issue in the issue hierarchy. In practice, a pull request which has a link to a Jira task which is linked to a story which is again linked to an epic will be shown categorized as linked to that epic on the Work Log when grouping by epics.

Activity which we are not able to link to any issue of the selected issue type will be still visible under their own rows on the Work Log.

The "Other Issues" row shows all of the activity linked to other issues owned by the team which we are not grouping the Work Log by. For example, when grouping by epics if the team has worked on a standalone task which is not linked to any epic it will be shown under the "Other Issues" row.  

The "Bugs" row shows all of the activity which is linked to issue type bug. Work related to bugs are separated under their own row since most teams want to pay special attention to how much work related to bugs they have.

Finally, the "Everything else" row shows all of the activity which we are not able to group to any of the rows above it. This can include unlinked commits and pull requests as well as activity linked to jira issues owned by other teams than the team we are looking at. The idea of the "Everything else" row is to highlight the more reactive work which might not be reflected in the team's issue tracker. This is why the Work Log can give you a more holistic picture to your work in progress compared to your issue tracker.

Debugging the Work Log grouping

You might stumble upon an activity for which you are unsure why it is grouped on a certain row on the Work Log or you might be missing some activity which you expected to see there. Below are a couple of settings which can affect seeing or not seeing something on the Work Log.

Issue type mapping

In Swarmia you can map issue types flexibly. When grouping the work log by a specific issue type you can check from the Jira settings what all issue types have been mapped as that issue type in Swarmia. If you are missing certain issues or some of them seem wrongly assigned, make sure that the issue type mapping looks like expected and that the issue you are debugging has this issue type.

Issue Ownerships mapping

In Swarmia you can decide which issues are mapped to a specific team with issue ownership mapping. When looking at a specific team on the Work Log and grouping by a specific issue type, you will only see the issues which are owned by that team. If you are missing certain activity or seeing too many issues, make sure that the issue ownerships have been correctly defined and the issue you are looking for matches the defined issue ownership criteria for the team we are looking at.

Team composition

Whilst Jira issues are assigned to teams based on their issue ownership mapping, other activity such as commits and pull requests are mapped for teams based on the members of the team. If you are seeing some extra activity or missing some activity, make sure that the team composition looks as expected from the teams settings.