Introducing Custom Chart: create any chart from your task data

Aug 30, 2017

When you create a Screenful dashboard, you get a nice set of charts pre-selected on your dashboard for Trello, JIRA, GitHub, or Pivotal Tracker. You can configure charts according to your preferences and you can further tweak your charts using filters. The pre-selected charts provide you a fairly complete picture of the status of a project, big or small, agile or not. 

But you don't have to stop there. You might need a specific piece of information, which is not captured by the any of the default charts. Then it's time to dig deeper into your data by creating a custom chart. 

Create your first custom chart

To create a custom chart, go to dashboard settings and click create custom chart at the bottom.

You'll be presented with a list options that allows you to choose what kind of chart to create. Let's assume you want to create a chart that shows the cycle time per label. In the chart settings, you'd select Cycle time as the metric and group the data by Label

These selections produce a chart as below:

In the chart settings, you can choose to show this chart with horizontal instead of vertical bars:

That gives you an overview of how long it takes to work on a task of a specific type, and also helps you in estimating future work of similar tasks. 

Slice & dice further with the stacked bar chart

To explore further, let's assume you want to see the number of tasks completed per assignee. But instead of just the total, you'd like to see also a breakdown by task type. How many tasks each individual completed and what types of tasks they were?

To get an answer to that question, you can create a custom chart with Stacked bar chart selected as the chart type grouped by Assignee, which yields:

This chart shows the breakdown of tasks completed per assignee. hovering your mouse over a bar reveals the numbers per task type:

You can create as many of these charts as you want, give them a suitable name, and place them on your dashboard. Custom chart comes with the same filtering and aggregation capabilities as any other screen in your dashboard.

If you turn you dashboard into TV mode, your custom charts are included in the rotation:

Pretty cool, eh? This is a work in progress and we welcome your comments on this new feature.

Let us know if you have questions or feedback by contacting hello@screenful.com. To stay on the loop, read our blog, or follow us on LinkedIn

This article was written by Sami Linnanvuo

Sami is the founder & CEO of Screenful, the company that turns data into visual stories. You can find him on Twitter.