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Issues opened vs closed: the gap is the whole story

Every week gets two bars: grey for what came in, green for what got closed. Nobody needs a widget to tell them work arrives and work finishes — what you actually need is whether those two numbers are converging or drifting apart, week after week. That gap is the backlog's real net flow, and it's the only part of this chart worth staring at.

deckgauge · Board · Intelligence
OpenedClosed

Six weeks, opened (grey) vs closed (green), all connected sources.

What it measures, and where the data comes from

One bucket per calendar week (Monday start), split two ways: how many issues were created that week, and how many were closed that week — pooled across every issue source you've connected, not tracked separately per source.

  • Jira — issue creation and resolution timestamps.
  • Azure DevOps — work item creation and closed-state timestamps.
  • GitHub — issue creation and closed timestamps, for repos you've connected.
  • GitLab — issue creation and closed timestamps, for projects you've connected.

They all land in the same weekly opened/closed pair, so this is a whole-org view of intake versus resolution — it won't tell you Jira is fine while GitHub is drowning. If you need that breakdown, you're looking at a per-source filtered board instead.

How to read it

Ignore the height of either bar on its own — a big grey bar in a week where the whole team was heads-down building is completely normal. Watch the gap between grey and green instead, and which side is winning.

Grey consistently taller than green, week after week, means the backlog is growing — you're taking in more than you're clearing. Green catching up to or passing grey means you're drawing it down. A gap that keeps widening rather than holding steady is the pattern that deserves a conversation; a gap that's roughly the same width every week, even if it's not zero, is just how this team runs.

What it tells you over time

Four straight weeks — that's the line to watch for here. Anything shorter than that and grey beating green is just an ordinary week: a triage sweep dumped a pile of old bugs into tickets, or an incident generated its usual crop of follow-ups. Cross that four-week mark and it stops being noise — you're looking at a backlog that's quietly on track to be next quarter's "why is this so big" conversation.

Example situations

1. Opened wins for a month straight

deckgauge · Issues Opened vs Closed
OpenedClosed

Grey pulling ahead of green for five weeks running.

What you're seeing: the grey bar climbs every single week while green quietly shrinks. Nobody made an announcement — the backlog is just getting bigger, one ordinary week at a time.

How to react: this is exactly the kind of drift that's invisible day-to-day and obvious in hindsight. Don't let it resolve itself by accident. Check Work in Progress alongside this — if WIP is also climbing, people are switching between too many things to close anything out.

Managerial playMake the call on purpose, in the open: either cap what's allowed into the backlog this sprint, or pull in extra capacity to work it down — but decide which, don't let intake win by default because nobody looked. Put a running backlog-size number in the weekly update so it can't quietly balloon out of sight again, and revisit this chart in three weeks to confirm the gap actually closed rather than just feeling better.

2. Green spikes after a declared cleanup push

deckgauge · Issues Opened vs Closed
OpenedClosed

Cleanup sprint announced at week 3 — green jumps past grey.

What you're seeing: two ordinary weeks, then green pulls well ahead of grey and stays there — right on schedule with a cleanup sprint the team said out loud they were running.

How to react: confirm the push worked instead of just assuming it — the chart is the proof, not the announcement. Check that opened didn't quietly shrink because the team stopped filing legitimate new work to hit the number; a real win keeps both bars honest, it doesn't just suppress one of them.

Managerial playCall the win by name in the next update, with the before/after gap attached — it's the kind of concrete result that's easy to forget by the following sprint. Then ask what made this push work and whether any of it — smaller batch sizes, a dedicated triage day, whatever it was — is worth keeping as a standing habit rather than a one-off event.

Frequently asked

What does issues opened versus closed show?
Two bars per week: grey for issues opened, green for issues closed, across Jira, Azure DevOps and GitHub.
What should I actually look at on this chart?
The gap between the two bars, not their height. The gap is the backlog's net flow — whether the two numbers are converging or drifting apart week after week is the only part worth studying.
What does a persistent gap mean?
Consistently opening more than you close means the backlog is growing structurally. That is a capacity or intake problem, and no amount of prioritisation inside the backlog fixes it.

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