Investments

How to setup Investments in Haystack?

Track how your teams resources are spent over time by setting up investment categories on Haystack.

Follow the below step to set them up.

Setup Investments

1. Open "Investments" page

Head to Investments from in org settings.

2. Edit, delete or add Investments from here

You can

• Add Investments

• Edit Investments

• Delete Investmenets

3. Define Investment Criteria

Below is an example of a category inside Haystack's own team to track all our initiatives around Technical debt using JIRA epics.

Check What categories should I track?

Each Investment will have

• Color: Same color will be used in the rest of the app representing the investment

• Name: Name shown in the rest of the app

• Description (optional): Shown only in Investments setting page. Used to ensure other members in the organization can understand what the investment represents

• Filter: Issues are tagged with an investments based on the filters set.

You can any of the following properties of an issue as filter

• Project

• Assignee

• Priority

• Issue Type

• SLA status

• Epic

• Label

• Title

• Custom Field

with the following operators

• is

• is not

• contains

• exists

• does not exist

Each filter can have And/Or operators.

4. See Issues that fit Investments filters

At the bottom of Investment definition Haystack shows how many issues fit into the rules you have selected.

You can click on the text to see all issues that fit your filters. You can edit the metadata shown in the table by clicking the "View" dropdown allowing you to ensure the correct Issues are tagged.

5. Prioritize Investments

An issue can only be tagged to a single investment category.

If an issue fits into multiple categories, Haystack tags the issue to the top most fitting category.

You can change the order of the investment categories by holding the 6 dots icon next to them.

Any issue which does not fit to any category will belong to "Uncategorized" section. Uncategorized section cannot be ordered, removed or edited.

Reporting Investment Categories

Once investments are setup, you will be able to create custom reports grouped by or filtered by Investments

Investment are shown in retros page, metrics page or the reports page.

Retro Report

In Retros Report, you can see Investments across all your sprints/weeks. This will allow you to have a quick glance on where you spend your time.

If you click on any of the Retro Reports, you can see Investment for that particular sprint/week.

Investment Report

In both metrics page or the reports page you can create an Investment Report.

You can select any "Issue" based metric

Option #1: Filter By Investments

You can filter out issues by investments using the Filter button.

Option #2: Group By Investments

You can group issues by investments by using Group by: Investments option.

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FAQ

How do you prevent duplicates?

Each issue is assigned one category. We use the category priorities you’ve created in your settings to determine a ranking order. We process every issue, cross-check against your category definitions (in order of your priorities), and assign that issue to the first category match. That issue will not be assigned to lower priority categories even if there is a match found.

What if different teams use different labelling?

Haystack gives flexible tooling allowing you to have an abstraction across different teams.

You can check the full list of tooling provided.

What categories should I track?

Haystack provides a flexible engine to tag your issues. The system does not have opinions, however, we do have recommendations.

• Dropbox's KTLO framework.

  • New Stuff

  • Improve Stuff

  • Productivity

  • Keep the lights on

• Product Focused Team

  • Roadmap Item

  • Non-roadmap Item

  • Bugs

• Technical Focused Teams

  • New Features

  • Bugs

  • Technical Debt

Feel free to choose whichever one that fits your organizations goals the best.

What if I change my category definitions?

It takes a few minutes for Haystack to tag every issue after any updates on Investment categories.

After the update process is completed, all your investment reports will reflect the changes.

How often are categories applied?

Haystack runs batch tagging for investments.

Initial setup can take up to 3-5 minutes to tag all issues. However, any issue creation/updates can take up to 15 minutes to reflect the Investment category changes.