Jazz reports

The Jazz™ Team Reports component provides an awareness of the actions, behaviors and progress of a team or project.
Edition note: The reports feature applies to Rational Team Concert™ Standard edition and Enterprise edition only.

Visualizing data about the software development process can make certain trends more accessible, when they might otherwise be hidden or obscured. By making this information available at a glance, reports can enable effective decision-making.

Overview of the Team Reports component

There are two main parts of the reports component: the data warehouse and the reports engine.
The data warehouse
A data warehouse is a storage facility for read-only, historical and aggregated data. Once data is written to the data warehouse, that data cannot be modified by subsequent readers. Through the use of an industry standard "star schema", rather than a more normalized table structure, the data warehouse is optimized for efficient queries and quick response times. Reports access the data that is stored in this data warehouse.
The Jazz Team Server provides a data warehouse, as well as an extensible mechanism for gathering information to store in the data warehouse at periodic times. Out of the box, snapshots are provided that aggregate and store various data about work items, source control, and builds. A third party may contribute new snapshots that gather new data from the Jazz repository (or from any source).
The reports engine
The engine on the Jazz Team Server that generates reports from the data in the data warehouse is based on the Eclipse BIRT (Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools) project. BIRT reads a report template, gathers the needed data from the data warehouse and generates a report which can be viewed in the Jazz web UI and rich client.
Report Template
A report template consists of a BIRT report design file on the server. This template defines the look and feel of the report and describes the data that it uses. Report templates may define one or more parameters, for which the user supplies the value.
Report
Once a report template has been supplied with parameters, the result may be saved as a report. A report consists of a reference to a particular template, together with this collection of user-supplied parameters. It is these saved reports that appear in the Reports page in the web UI, as well as under "My Reports" and "Shared Reports" in the Team Artifacts view of the Rational Team Concert client. Since the parameter values are known, reports can typically be given useful and descriptive names.
Report Viewer
BIRT generates a report with the associated pieces that integrate the viewer into the Jazz web UI and rich client. Reports are also made visible on the web UI dashboard using the Reports viewlets.


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