Engineering Delivery

Meetings, open work and initiatives

The Work part of Engineering Delivery is for the work in hand right now, not the trends. Open work lists everything that has stopped moving, Initiatives shows how your bigger pieces of work are progressing, and Meetings gives your standup and retro their numbers, so the conversation starts from facts. Everything is read at team level, and no list names who opened or holds an item.

New to DORA? Start with What is DORA?, then come back here.

Where to find it

Open Engineering Delivery and choose Work on the left. It has three tabs: Open work, Initiatives and Meetings.

Throughout this page we follow a fictional team of six who build an online booking app.

Open work

Open work shows "Everything open that is not moving, oldest first: pull requests, drafts included, and the tickets stuck in their status. Short lists to unblock before the standup."

It has two lists:

Open pull requests: every open pull request, drafts included, longest open first. A pull request is a proposed change waiting to be reviewed and merged.
Stuck now: tickets in progress, in review or in testing, longest in the status they are in now first, from your tracker's status history.

What a reading means. A short list is healthy. A long list, or items that have been open for weeks, means work is starting faster than it finishes. Every open item competes for the same people's attention, so each takes longer.

How to use it:

Look at it just before standup.
Start with the oldest items and ask what each needs to move.
Finish, hand over or close an item before starting something new.

For why this works, see Work in progress.

Initiatives

Initiatives shows "The Jira epics and Linear projects in progress, scope added since work on each began, and when each will likely be done at the pace its team kept on it over the last 12 weeks."

An epic is a big piece of work split into many tickets, such as "new checkout flow". Jira calls it an epic; in Linear it is a project. Both are read the same way, by team, and this page calls both epics. For each epic with work begun and work left, the list shows how much is done, how much was added since work began, and a likely finish date. Open an epic to see its tickets, open ones first.

Two ideas help you read it:

Scope added is work that joined the epic after the team started on it. Some is normal: you learn as you build. A lot of it, or scope that keeps growing, is often called scope creep, and it is the most common reason big work finishes late.
The likely finish date is a forecast from the team's own pace on that epic over the last 12 weeks. It is not a promise. If scope keeps being added, or the team's pace changes, the date moves.

How to use it. If an epic's date keeps slipping, check scope added first. Then ask whether the epic should be split, or whether some of the added work can wait for a later piece.

Meetings

Meetings gives your standup (the short daily check-in) and your retro (the regular look back at how the team works) the numbers they need. Choose Standup or Retro at the top, and a team, or every team you see.

Standup

The standup is organised around three questions, each with its own tab:

Finished: "What did we finish since yesterday?" The changes merged and the deploys that went out since yesterday.
Today: "What are we focused on today?" The tickets and changes in progress.
Blocked: "What is blocked or waiting?" Changes waiting for a first review, longest wait first, and tickets stuck in their status.

A change that has waited 72 hours or more for a first review is marked Stale. A ticket counts as stuck once it has been in one status for more than 3 days.

Running a good standup with it. Spend most of the time on Blocked. Finished work needs a moment of recognition, not a report. For each stale review, agree who picks it up today. For each stuck ticket, ask what it needs to move, not who is behind.

Retro

The retro reads the sprint in progress, if your teams work in sprints set in Settings, or the last 14 days otherwise. It compares that window with the one before it: the same days of the previous sprint, or the 14 days before. The window is shown at the top, for example "against the same days of the sprint before".

It has these tabs:

Measures: tiles for changes merged, tickets done, deploys, change lead time, ticket cycle time, time to first review, time to merge, merged without review, median change size, very large changes and change fail rate.
Shipped: "What shipped". The changes merged in the window, and the slowest to reach customers, from first commit to deploy.
Broke: "What broke". The releases that needed a fix, with the change that caused each.
Stuck: "What is stuck". Changes stuck waiting for a first review, and tickets stuck in their status.
Notes: the notes board, when retro notes are turned on in Settings.

Running a good retro with it. Pick one thing. Look at the measures, find the one that moved the wrong way, and open the tab that explains it. If time to first review rose, the Stuck tab shows which changes waited. Agree one change to try, and check the same tile at the next retro. Turning that change into a working agreement makes it something the team can check.

Keep, stop, start and shout outs

The notes board has four columns: Keep, Stop, Start and Shout outs. Anyone on the team can add notes before or during the retro.

Notes are never signed: no one is named as their author. Anyone who sees the team can add or remove them. That makes it safer to write down what is not working.

Questions the app raises

What does "Stale" mean on a change waiting for review?

The change has waited 72 hours or more for its first review. It is the first thing to pick up at standup.

Why does an epic's finish date keep moving?

The date comes from the team's own pace over the last 12 weeks and the work left. When scope is added, or the pace changes, the date moves with it. Look at scope added first.

Our retro shows the last 14 days, but we work in sprints. Why?

The retro reads the sprint in progress only when Settings has sprints with a start on or before today. An admin can set sprints in Settings.

There is no Notes tab in the retro. Where is it?

The notes board shows when retro notes are turned on in Settings.

How do I hear about stuck work without opening the app?

The weekly note and the retro nudge flag it for you, for example how many changes have waited more than three days for a first review. See Goals, alerts and Scout.

A ticket has been stuck for a week. What should we do?

Ask what it needs to move: an answer, a reviewer, a decision or a split. If tickets keep getting stuck in the same stage, that stage is the team's bottleneck. See Stuck work and Ticket to customer.

Learn more

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