Setting up Outlier

Outlier is a dashboard gadget that reads one board. How often it has something to say depends on the board: measured, 27 mornings of 46 on one that runs two-week sprints, and 5 of 209 on five long-running backlogs. The method has the measurement.

This page is how to put it somewhere and what to expect for the first fortnight. What it measures is a separate page: the method.

The three numbered steps are the setup. Everything after them is optional.

1. Add it to a dashboard#

A Jira administrator installs the app from the Atlassian Marketplace, once for the site. After that, anybody can add the gadget. The steps need no permission at all.

• Open a dashboardopen a Jira dashboard, or create one with Dashboards → Create dashboard.
• Add the gadgetchoose Add gadget, then find Outlier.
• Pick a boardthe list is the boards you can see. The picker names the project each one belongs to, because two boards on a site are often called the same thing.
• Savepress Save.

That is the whole of the required setup. Everything else on this page is optional, and can be changed later without losing anything.

A board needs a saved filter behind it. Almost all do. A board without one cannot be read at all. The form says so when you pick it, rather than letting you save something that will never work.

2. Wait for the first read#

Outlier reads the board's history as soon as it is configured, not from the day you installed it. There is no watching period and no sprint to wait for: the norms come from the history that is already there.

• The walk takes a few minutes on a small board and up to an hour on a large one.
• While it runs, the card says reading this board's history, with a count.
• When it finishes, most columns have a norm and the card starts working.

When a column has no norm#

A column that has passed fewer than fifteen tickets in the last year has no norm of its own. The card says so, says why, and counts what is missing. The method has the rule.

What the first weeks add#

The first morning's card is the whole product: the findings, the columns behind them, and the footer saying how much of the board was looked at. What time adds is the card's own record: a row of squares showing which of the last ten mornings it had something to raise. Until that record exists, the card says what it would have said over the board's last quarter, as the method describes.

3. Read the card#

1. Read the findings. Three findings at most are shown, the furthest past this board's own normal first. A ticket back from done takes the first slot.
2. Check any of them against the board. Each one carries the numbers it was derived from: how many tickets, how long, and how many finished stays the norm came from.
3. Read the footer. It says how much was looked at, how much is in flight, and how many columns are being watched.

The footer is the point of the product. It is what makes a quiet morning a result rather than an absence.

To see what the morning was measured against, open "How this was counted". It shows how much of the board was looked at, how much of it was standing still, and how far back the stays behind the norms reach.

The sample each norm was built from is printed where it is used: in the sentence under the finding itself.

The states you will see#

Each of them, drawn rather than described. The two that keep a card keep its buttons, and what those copy carries the banner with it.

Two more things appear over a card rather than instead of one, so they are not in the table:

• a line counting down the days left in the trial;
• if the gadget cannot reach the app at all, a line saying so, and that reloading the dashboard usually fixes it.

Optional, any time#

The card works once the three steps above are done. Everything below is for later: what a team may change, and then what the Jira administrator who installed it needs to know.

Copy it into a thread#

• To paste the card into Slack, Teams or a Jira comment, press Copy. It puts the card into your clipboard as text.
• To include the numbers behind each finding, press with evidence.

The card is built to travel to where the standup already happens, rather than to gather people around a dashboard. The text is assembled from the same numbers and the same sentences as the card, so the two cannot say different things in front of the team.

Ask Rovo why#

Where your site has Rovo, a third control appears: Ask Rovo why. It opens your own Rovo with the card and one question already written: what in the comments or the linked work explains these waits.

Outlier deliberately does not read descriptions, comments or linked work. That is exactly why the question is worth handing to something that does.

• It opens Rovo; it does not run it. Nothing is spent by the card being drawn, and nothing by the button being there. Whatever happens after a press is metered by Rovo, the way any other conversation in it is.
• Whether it appears is not ours to set. The control asks Atlassian whether this reader has Rovo, and draws itself only if the answer is yes. On a site without Rovo, or for a person who does not have it, there is no button and nothing else changes about the card.
• There is no switch here to turn it off. The switch is the one your organisation already has.

What goes into the question, whose permissions and credits it runs on, and where the answer goes are in Privacy → Ask Rovo why.

Post it before standup, on a schedule#

Copy needs somebody to press it. If the standup happens at a fixed time in a channel, a rule can fetch the same morning and put it there. Nobody has to visit the board.

Outlier does not deliver it. It answers when your own rule asks: your trigger, your schedule, your channel, your credentials. Nothing it reads leaves your Atlassian site except through the step you write.

That is the whole reason it works this way: an app that posted to your Slack itself would need an address outside Atlassian, and this one has none.

• Add a triggerin Automation, build a rule with the trigger you want: Scheduled for a fixed time on working days.
• Add the Outlier stepadd the step Read this morning's questions, and pick the card it reads.
• Add the step that carries ita Slack or Teams step, an email or a comment, with one of the step's values in it.

Pick the card the step reads#

The step asks for one thing. The form below is that step, drawn from the same component the rule editor uses. It is a sample rather than something to fill in here, and the Next it mentions belongs to the rule editor around it.

The card already knows the board, the saved filter and the labels, so there is nothing else to fill in.

Where one board carries two Outlier gadgets, they are told apart by what each is narrowed to, or by a quick filter, or by the day it was added.

Use what the step hands back#

The step offers four values to use in the step that follows:

Take them from the smart-value picker rather than typing them. Automation composes that name from the app's own manifest.

In a hand-written JSON body, use textJson: {"text": "{{fetchedOutlierMorning.textJson}}"} is valid JSON.

Know what happens when the read fails#

When the last read of the board did not finish, the step still answers. It hands back one sentence saying so, with said set to no and state set to failed. It answers the same way while the board's history is still being read (learning) and when the last read is too old to be this morning's (stale). A rule that posts unconditionally posts that sentence into the channel; a condition keeps it out.

The rule itself stops, and the reason goes to its audit log rather than the channel, in three cases only:

• The step points at a gadget that has been repointed or removed, or names no gadget at all.
• Whoever the rule runs as cannot open the board.
• The site's subscription has lapsed. The step needs a subscription, and stops rather than degrades without one. The card says the same thing in its own words to whoever opens it.

Which condition to use#

A quiet morning still says something. That is the point of the product: the text is never empty. Put the condition before the step that posts.

The cost of a condition on said: a channel that goes quiet looks the same whether the board was calm or the collection broke, because both answer no. state names them apart, and it is the one to branch on if you want to be told when something is wrong. The card on the dashboard says the same: which of its states it is in, with the age of the last read on it.

Be told when it stops#

We cannot tell you: the app has no address outside Atlassian and cannot write into Jira. Your own rule can, with a condition on state rather than said (why).

Do this at setup, not after the first silence. The failure this guards against looks exactly like nothing happening.

1. Build a second rule, scheduled weekly.
2. Give it one condition:

If {{fetchedOutlierMorning.state}} equals failed or stale, send a message to whoever administers Jira here, with {{fetchedOutlierMorning.text}} in it.

That message is the app saying what is wrong, in its own words, to the person who can fix it, on a schedule you chose.

Change what it watches#

Press Change in the configuration. It reopens the picker. You can also:

• narrow to labels, to a quick filter, or to the kinds of work the board carries - epics and subtasks are left out to begin with;
• choose which columns count as review;
• set the working week and hours;
• frame the card by open sprints.

Narrowing changes what the gadget measures, so it starts the norms again. The form warns you when a change would do that. The warning goes away if you put the setting back.

The working week belongs to the board, not to you. A team that rests on Friday and Saturday says so here. A reader in another timezone does not change it by opening the dashboard.

Keep parked work off the card#

A column can be a container by design: a parking bay, or a queue for work blocked on somebody else. A card that raises the same true thing every morning teaches its reader to stop looking.

Name a label under Never raise tickets labelled. Tickets carrying it stay off the card.

Unlike narrowing, this costs the board nothing. The ticket is still read, and still counts towards what a usual wait here looks like. A team cannot move its own baseline by tidying up. That is also why this row raises no warning about starting the norms again.

A label cannot be both. Narrowing to a label un-parks it.

Split a board between teams#

Use one gadget per stream, each narrowed to that stream's labels.

Mixed streams share a norm, and a norm built from two teams describes neither. On a board carrying three kinds of work at three speeds, the same column's norm came out at 16.5 working days read whole and 5.0 read as one stream.

There is one condition. Narrowing costs the gadget the rest of the board's history. A stream has to finish enough work of its own to be measured: fifteen completed stays in a column. The card says so until it has them.

A stream of twenty tickets in a quarter spent six mornings of seven still learning, and raised nothing, while the whole board went on speaking. If your stream is that thin, read the board's own card. The method page says what that costs.

Find every card on the site#

Installing is site-wide. After that, anybody can put a card on a dashboard without asking. That is deliberate: a card is a view of a board somebody already has access to. It also means the person who installed it has no idea how many exist.

Open Jira settings → Apps → Outlier. It lists each card, the board it watches, what it is narrowed to, and when it was last opened.

Read the Last opened column: a card nothing reads stops being collected for, and later forgotten. Remove it says when, and what counts as reading.

Nothing on that page can change a card. To stop one, remove the gadget from its dashboard. The page is there so you can find the one to remove.

Know what it costs your Jira#

The person who installs this is the one who answers for it, so here is what it spends: about thirty requests a day for one board and a few hundred for ten, plus a few each time somebody opens the card - not thousands. The background figures were counted by running the shipped code against a stub of the two Jira search APIs; what a card costs when it is opened, over up to three hundred tickets in flight, was read from the code rather than counted.

• The bill tracks how much the board moves, not how large it is. The collection reads only what changed.
• A second gadget with the same settings is not a second collection. One narrowed differently, or set to another working week, is its own walk and its own pass.
• The cost per board falls as boards are added. What they share is read once.

What this does not tell you is latency, or where your site's own rate limits sit. Those belong to your instance and your plan, and we would be guessing.

Remove it#

1. Delete the gadget.
2. Stop any rule that reads it.

Reading a card is what keeps its board read: opening the dashboard, or a rule asking the step for that morning. A card delivered into a channel by a rule keeps its board collected without anybody opening the dashboard. If nothing reads a board for 30 days, Outlier stops reading it too. Everything it derived is deleted at 90.

Uninstalling the app deletes what it stored, rather than leaving it to Atlassian's retention window.

Ask for help#

1. If the card says the last read did not finish, press Copy diagnostic on it. It copies the state of collection for that board, as text. It carries no ticket data, and is the fastest thing to send with a question.
2. Send it, or a line on what looks wrong, through the support page or to support@chmut.com.

You will hear back within 48 hours. Weekends and Ukrainian public holidays do not count towards them, and the mailbox is read 09:00 to 19:00 Kyiv time.

What is known to be broken#

A public issue tracker is a promise this project cannot keep honestly yet: one person answers the mail, and a tracker nobody grooms says less than an empty page does. It fills with duplicates, the dates rot, and a reader cannot tell a dead entry from a live one. This section is what replaces it.

Anything known to be wrong is written here: what it is, when it was found, and what to do about it meanwhile. It comes off the list when the fix ships, not when it is written. If the list is empty, that is the claim being made, and it is a claim you can hold us to.

Nothing is open as of 16 September 2026.

If what you are seeing is not here, it is not something we know about. The address above is the fastest way to change that.