How to create health status indicator fields like RAG or traffic light in Jira and Advanced Roadmaps
Platform notice: Server and Data Center only. This article only applies to Atlassian products on the Server and Data Center platforms.
Support for Server* products ended on February 15th 2024. If you are running a Server product, you can visit the Atlassian Server end of support announcement to review your migration options.
*Except Fisheye and Crucible
Summary
When reporting the status of projects, initiatives or other complex and long-running activities, the RAG (red, amber, green — or traffic light) notation is widely used.
Jira and Advanced Roadmaps don't have this feature natively and there are several Apps in the Marketplace that implement this concept in different ways (and vary in flexibility and usability) — though Advanced Roadmaps doesn't support 3rd party specific custom field types (see, vote and comment on JPOSERVER-2669).
This article offers a native alternative making use of the Select List custom field and Unicode characters like 🔴, 🟡 and 🟢. It's less attractive and customizable than the 3rd party apps, as it's just a Select Field with "special" UTF-8 characters or emoji, but should work on Roadmaps and elsewhere until the features below are implemented.
Feature requests
The feature request's being tracked through JPOSERVER-4346 - Getting issue details... STATUS
The feature request to have 3rd party specific custom fields available in Advanced Roadmaps is tracked on JPOSERVER-2669 - Getting issue details... STATUS
Atlassian Atlas also brings new views into high-level progress tracking and offers native health indicators, too.
Environment
All versions of Jira 7 and 8.
JVM and Database must support Unicode characters like 🔴, 🟡 and 🟢.
Solution
- Create a custom field of type Select List (single choice)
- Add options like
- Red 🔴
- Amber 🟡
- Green 🟢
- Add the new custom field to the screens you need
Since this is a regular Select List, the available Options can be configured by context. You may use "Off track", "At risk", "On track" instead.
These visual Options are displayed all alike everywhere in Jira, from filter results, dashboard gadgets to Advanced Roadmaps Plans.
Other alternatives making use of HTML tags within the Option texts, like this Community article on using "lozenges", may require to "enable HTML in field descriptions" in Jira and may not render correctly everywhere, like Roadmap Plans and JQL autocomplete.
Caveats
Having just the 🔴 🟡 🟢 "icons" as options — or having them to the left of the text — may look better, but this may bring issues when writing or autocompleting searches and JQL.
As of Jira 8.x, autocompletion works by matching the beginning of the Options so "🟢 Green" won't show up as you start typing "Health = G...". The autocomplete works fine when you haven't inputted the first letter of the option, but if there are many options from the same or several field contexts, the option you're after may not show up in autocomplete/autosuggestion.