What is the cumulative flow diagram?
The cumulative flow diagram shows the various statuses of your project's work items over time. It's a visual indication of how many work items are passing through each column of your board. This helps you see which columns accumulate more work items than others, and identify bottlenecks in your team's workflow.
You can access the Cumulative flow diagram from your side panel. Select Reports > Cumulative Flow Diagram.
The diagram gives you a visualization of the following key metrics for your team:
Cycle time: The time a work item takes to move through the "In progress" statuses and becomes ready to deliver.
Work in progress: This is the number of work items that are actively being worked on at any given time.
You can limit work in progress on your board by hovering over a column name and selecting More () > Set column limit.
Scope: For Scrum teams, the diagram can give you a visualization of how much work has been committed to in any given sprint.
To learn more about metrics that may be useful to your agile team, check out our Agile Coach site.
How to read the report
The horizontal axis represents time, and the vertical axis represents work items.
Each colored area of the chart equates to a column on your board.
Each dot represents one work item transition, such as a work item being created (and thus being transitioned to To do) or a work item transitioning from one status to another (eg: moving from To do to In progress).
If your chart contains an area that is widening vertically over time, the column that equates to the widening area will generally be a bottleneck.
For example:
If you start a sprint with 5 work items, all work items will begin in the To Do column. If you view the diagram, it will show 5 work items To Do, 0 work items In Progress, and 0 work items Done.
If you then move 2 work items to In Progress, the diagram will display 5 work items To Do (because 5 have passed through that column), 2 work items In Progress, and 0 work items Done.
If you then move 1 work item from In Progress to Done, the diagram will show To Do = 5, In Progress = 2, and Done = 1.
If you then take that 1 work item out of Done and move it back to To Do, the diagram will remove the 1 from Done and remove 1 from In Progress, but the numbers in To Do will remain the same, because no new work items have arrived. Therefore, the diagram will show To Do = 5, In Progress = 1, Done = 0.
Things to keep in mind
The Cumulative flow diagram is based on your board's column mapping. A work item is considered to be 'To Do' when it's in the left-most column of your board. Similarly, a work item is 'Done' when it's in the right-most column of your board.
The diagram displays data for the entire life of the project. If your team works in sprints, you may find it more useful to use the date filter at the top to only show work items for one sprint.
If your project has the Backlog enabled, work items created on the backlog will show up on the diagram as a To do transition.
Ideally, your diagram should be rising evenly, except for the band representing Done work item, which should be continuously getting taller.
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