Building lightweight dashboards using Excel
TFS work items can provide a wealth of information that can be used for decision making and analysis, answering questions like:
- Are we on track?
- Is our bug debt growing or shrinking?
- What is our incoming/fix/close rate?
and many others…
One way of keeping on top of the daily status is by building dashboards that help you summarize and clearly visualize all this information (this is particularly useful for driving triage and also for retrospective analysis).
Here is a sample dashboard that you can use to track your projects. It pulls data from a work item query to showcase some of these metrics, including bug counts, incoming/fix/close rates, bug backlogs, bug lifetimes, and more!
This sample Excel dashboard is designed to work with a project that uses the VSTS Agile Process for Software Development. Detailed usage instructions are available in the How to use this Dashboard sheet. Feel free to download it (with the disclaimer, “provided as is, you are responsible for its use”) and take it for a test drive, open it during status meetings, use it, and enhance it... We hope that it is valuable both as an example and as a starting point for leveraging the full power of work items.
Here is another post from Ameya that uses similar techniques (also has a video that might give you more details).
Feedback and comments always welcome... Enjoy!
Ben