The Jazz™ Team Reports component provides
an awareness of the actions, behaviors and progress of a team or project.
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.