Reading the panel

Statuswatch adds one panel to the Jira work item view: how long has this item spent in each status? It is collapsed by default and recomputes from Jira's change history each time you open it, reading as you — so it can only show history you could already read.

Business hours are off until someone turns them on, so on most projects every figure is calendar time, nights and weekends included.

The elements, in the order you meet them#

Counted in …#

This line appears only when the project has business hours on: Counted in, then this project's working hours, or the calendar that applied, as in the Support calendar. Select it for a dialog giving that calendar's days, hours, breaks, holidays and time zone — and, where the project picks calendars by work type, component or label, why this one applied. It ends by pointing a project admin at the project's own settings, under Apps → Statuswatch — a section your site labels either Project settings or Space settings.

When the clock is paused#

With business hours on, an information panel appears whenever the moment you are looking is outside them, saying why and when counting resumes: Today is a holiday in this calendar (Team offsite). The clock is paused, counting again tomorrow at 06:30. The other wordings are Not a working day in this calendar, Outside working hours just now and On a break in this calendar. The resume time skips holidays and non-working days, so a Thursday evening before a Friday holiday says on Monday.

Nothing has gone wrong when this shows — it is the calendar doing its job. It is there because a figure that does not move looks like a broken counter: an item raised last night reads 0m all morning if this morning is a holiday. It does not appear on a finished item, where nothing is accruing anyway.

Is this unusual, or just long?#

A duration on its own does not say whether it is a problem. Six days in review is routine in one team and a fire in another, and the only honest reference point is your own project. So under the status a work item is currently in, the panel sometimes adds a line like:

Longer than all 14 stays this project has had in this status — median 7m.

The comparison is with this project, not with this work item's own earlier visits: every completed stay in that status, across the work items created in the last 90 days, up to 50 of them. Completed only — a stay still running is a lower bound rather than a measurement, and counting those would drag the comparison down and make everything look unusual.

The line appears rarely, and that is deliberate. It needs at least five completed stays to compare against, because "longer than both previous stays" is arithmetic rather than information. It only appears while the clock is still running, since on a finished item this is history being read rather than a situation to act on. And it only appears once the current stay is past the three-quarters mark — describing the ordinary is how a line teaches people to stop reading it. There are three wordings: longer than 3 in 4, longer than 9 in 10, and longer than all of them.

Nothing is stored. The comparison is worked out each time the panel opens, from what you are allowed to read, so two people with different project access can see different baselines — each one correct for them.

The due date countdown#

With a due date, a countdown sits above the rows: Due with the date, as in 12 Aug 2026, end of day. Beside it a verdict: 2d 4h left, 3h overdue, or on a finished item 1d to spare or 3h late.

Whether an item is late is decided by the wall clock; the amount beside the verdict is working time. Where there is no working time to report, the verdict is a bare Due now, On time, Overdue or Late.

Its bar is thicker, blue while there is time and red once there is not. Under it, either Working time only — weekends, breaks and holidays are skipped. or Calendar time, including nights and weekends.

The category legend#

A rollup by status category: a coloured dot, a total, and the category name in lower case, in workflow order. Grey is To do, blue In progress, green Done. It appears once the item has been in more than one category; once the clock has stopped, done normally drops out of it.

One row per status#

Then one row per status, longest first — per status, not per visit: its name, its total, and a bar coloured by its category. A status it was in more than once carries a multiplier: 3× means three separate stays, and the row's duration is their sum.

Where the item is now is marked, in one of two ways. While the clock is running that is a blue current. Once it has stopped — the item is finished and sitting in a done status — the marker is a green done instead, because the figure beside it is an earlier stay in that status and nothing is being added to it. Neither marker appears if the panel could not read the item's current status.

Under the statuses the item has been in come the ones it has not, at 0m, with an empty bar and a name that is not a link — there are no stays to list. They are the statuses this item's own work type can reach, so a bug and a story in the same project can show different ones. What an item skipped is often the point: an item that went straight from the backlog to done never passed through review, and this is where that shows.

Select the status name for the stays behind that total: 2d 4h in total, across 3 visits once there are two or more, then each stay oldest first — when it began, how long it lasted, whether it is still here or when it ended, and who moved the item there, or set on creation where the panel has no one to name.

The footer#

Two lines close the panel: the figure every bar is a share of — Total time since creation:, or Total time to done: — and a count of status changes.

Jump to configuration#

Beside the count of status changes, and again in the working-hours dialog, is a Jump to configuration link. It opens this project's Statuswatch settings directly, so the working hours behind a figure are one click away rather than something to go and find.

The link makes no assumption about who you are: Jira decides who may open project settings, and someone without that permission is turned away there rather than here.

What a bar's length means#

Every bar is a share of this item's whole measured life: a full track means all of its time, never one day and never a target, so bars cannot be compared between items. What is printed beside the bar, not its length, is the absolute figure. A status whose share rounds to nothing still gets a visible sliver.

Statuswatch reads no SLA field and has no connection to SLAs: it counts time in status, under the project's own calendar when one is set.

The clock stops at Done#

When the item sits in a done-category status, that closing stretch is dropped from the rows and the total, and the footer switches to Total time to done: — otherwise a finished item would accrue Done time for ever. The whole trailing run goes, so sweeping an item from Done to Closed does not change its measured length. A Done stretch the item later left, resolved then reopened, is kept: that time really did pass, and the clock runs again.

An item that has only ever been in done statuses is the exception: there would be nothing left to show, so its time stays.

How durations are written#

At most two units: 3d 4h, 12m, <1m for anything under a minute, and 0m for exactly nothing. The two are different claims: <1m is a stay too short to measure, 0m is no counted time at all — a status never entered, or one entered outside working hours. Values are truncated down, so rows can look a minute short of the total above them. With business hours on, d is one working day, not twenty-four hours.

Warnings the panel can show#

A warning sits above the figures, because it changes what they mean. Only one shows at a time. These are warnings, not the blue paused-clock panel above: a warning says a read failed, and the numbers below it are not what they should be.

Messages instead of the panel#

While it loads, the panel shows a spinner. In place of the figures you may see:

• No status history for this issue yet. — nothing could be measured.
• No issue in context. — no item to read.
• Could not read this issue history. — Jira could not be read. A viewer without permission sees this one too.
• Could not load the status history. — the panel could not reach the app.