Creating dashboards to drive conversations

We often talk about metrics and wonderful dashboards to showcase to stakeholders what’s going on and provide updates on progress. Let me provide an alternative view on this.

Creating dashboards to drive conversations

How about creating dashboards that help you as a team have conversations? For example today I created a very simple dashboard that had all our bugs on a particular project. I then labelled each bug in terms of what type it was. e.g. functional, reliability, security etc. This starts to provide an interesting view and you can have lots of conversations.

Using the data to help guide you

With the data and view of what’s going on you could come up with some questions. Some questions I can think of:

• Are we finding only functional bugs? Or are we finding bugs in other quality areas, such as security or performance?
• Are there areas we need to pay more attention to?
• Are we finding bugs that cover off risks?
• Are we tracking issues with requirements and design, or is it only in the build stage?
• Are we prioritising our bugs correctly?

From those questions you can then come up with some actions depending on what you want to do.

Summary

I’ve given an example here of tracking the type of quality attribute a bug is, however, potentially you could do other thing. I would suggest to experiment and figure out what you want conversations on. It could be for example, how long do bugs take to fix?

So, when you next think of dashboards and metrics, perhaps put a spin on it. Instead of what do stakeholders need? What do we need as a team?