Create a performance measurement dashboard

This task describes how to create a dashboard with Rational Team Concert™ to monitor performance metrics.

Before you begin
Before creating a performance management dashboard, a Jazz server must be set up and a Rational Team Concert project established on that server. If the dashboard needs to display data from more than one repository and the repositories are hosted on different Jazz Team servers, cross-server communication must be configured for all of the servers and you must have permission to access data on all of the servers. For more information about cross-repository dashboards, see About cross-repository dashboards.
About this task

Rational Team Concert capabilities can be used to measure and monitor a large number of lower-level activities using metrics that can provide insight about the effectiveness of practices.

To create a dashboard to monitor performance, you must perform the following tasks:
  • Determine the goals of the dashboard
  • Determine how the dashboard will address the goals
  • Create reports to collect and display metrics
  • Create and configure the dashboard

Determine goals of the dashboard

About this task
Before you can create an effective performance measurement dashboard, you must decide what purpose it is intended to address and how it will do that. Without this information, you cannot be sure that you are showing the right data or that it will help the intended users by supplying them with information that they need. The following issues should be considered:

Determine how dashboard will address goals

About this task

When you are confident that you understand the goals of the dashboard, you need to specify how the dashboard will meet them. There are a variety of viewlets that you can display on a dashboard, such as reports, Web pages, RSS feeds, and so on. Reports (the primary channel for metrics information) can be charts, small tables, cross tabulations, or trend indicators, for example.

Generally, a dashboard presents information that is intended to convey high-level concepts quickly without distracting you with details that you may not need. Essentially, you should be able to grasp the meaning of the data at a glance. Charts and trend indicators are generally more effective than data tables for achieving this goal. For access to more detailed information, you can use reports that have drill-down capabilities so that you can choose to look at more granular data if you need it. Rational Team Concert comes with a variety of multi-level reports.

Dashboard layout is also an important consideration. Screen real estate is limited, so reports must be small. Providing low-level, detailed data at the top level can take up too much space. Instead, provide higher-level information with a drill-down capability to explore other reports that can provide the detailed data. Generally, the purpose of the top-level dashboard is to let the users know whether everything is acceptable or they need to spend more time looking deeper.

To make the dashboard easier to view, try to arrange the page to avoid scroll bars when the dashboard is viewed in a typically sized window. Some necessity of vertical scrolling is usually acceptable, but horizontal scrolling is more of an imposition on users.

Create reports to collect and display metrics

About this task

When you have specified what you want to display in the dashboard, you are ready to construct it. You must create the reports that you want before you can add them to the dashboard. You can create reports from existing report templates or you can create new report templates.

Before starting to create reports, check the sample report templates supplied with Rational Team Concert. There are many report templates that may supply exactly what you need or something similar. A list of available report templates is included in the Rational Team Concert help (Available reports and templates). Generally, it is simpler to create a report from an existing report template than to create a new template, so look for one that is relatively close.

You can use the Rational Team Concert Eclipse client or Web client to create reports from templates that are deployed to your project, but you must use the Eclipse tool to create new report templates.

Create and configure the dashboard

About this task

Use the Rational Team Concert Web client to create the dashboard by following these steps:

  1. Using the Rational Team Concert Web client, log in to the Jazz Team server on which you want to host the dashboard..
  2. Decide whether you want to create a team, project or personal dashboard.
  3. To create the dashboard and edit the title, follow the steps in Creating a dashboard for the appropriate dashboard type. If you create a personal dashboard that you want other members of the project or team area to view, you must share it: Sharing a dashboard.
  4. Add viewlets (reports that you created in a previous step) and configure dashboard content by performing the tasks in the Adding and organizing content on a dashboard section.