Dashboards: for Projects, for Teams, for Personal Use

Tags: Dashboard widgets Wiki

Dashboards: for Projects, for Teams and for Personal Use

Why Dashboards?

Have a look and you will realize that there is an enormous amount of information in your ALM system, but extracting and presenting it efficiently is a rather hard problem.

You probably want to show different summaries in different situations, using different scopes and for different audiences. codeBeamer provides a lot of parametric wiki plugins and each presents one particular piece of information. The plugins let you place, configure and lay out information according to your needs. Just edit your project homepage, your personal homepage or your tracker homepage or create a brand new wiki page and fill it with plugins.

Here are some guidelines that might help you when you start implementing dashboards.

Dashboards for Different Scopes

It's possible to set up pages for one project, for a set of related projects, for one team or for one person:

In project home pages: display the project summary, recent activities, basic statistics, team members. Provide useful quick links to the most important project resources.
To implement a common dashboard for a set of related projects, you can create an "umbrella project" and use its homepage, or just use a regular wiki page in one of the projects. Show merged activity streams, aggregated statistics and shortcuts to jump quickly into the sub-projects.
In tracker home pages: show the recently submitted bugs, recent comments, number of open-versus-resolved issues or number of issues by various fields (status, assigned-to, etc.).
For personal use: aggregate your issues from your projects, related to the currently running milestones. Display your starred issues. Add quicklinks that make your navigation faster.

Dashboards for Different Audiences

Set up dashboards for different audiences, as they are very likely to be interested in different aspects of the projects:

For executives: provide a birds eye view that shows the current status as fast as possible. Leave out low-level technical details, for instance source code related information.
For management: they want to measure and manage running tasks and their progress, and want to see the stream of events that happen around the projects and the teams.
For developers: focus on technical details. In particular issues, documents, wiki content may have high importance. List the recent issues, content and source code activities.

Example Dashboard Layouts

Dashboards in codeBeamer are a special type of Wiki pages. Check the Dashboard and Widgets pages to learn more about the capabilities of dashboards. This guide shows a couple of examples to give you an idea about the possibilities. These are just suggestions and there are really no restrictions, so be creative and feel free to experiment.