Tim Wheeler
Director of Engineering Excellence, SquaredUp
Dashboard Stories
Gamified bug bash tracking
We love a ‘bug bash’ here at SquaredUp! To keep our house in order, we regularly encourage our developers and testers to put down tools on major features to go after smaller issues that have been 'bugging' them. This dashboard helps me measure the success of the team’s latest bug bash and adds a little gamification for some competitive fun.
Dashboard Preview
Challenge
Our two week bug bash sprints have typically been tracked in Jira, which doesn’t offer the centralized performance overview that myself and Director of Engineering, Josip, needed.
With the broader engineering team split into four sub-teams, tracking bugs closed per team in Jira is time consuming, and even then, you still can’t view overall stats across teams. Using Jira for daily performance tracking is not sustainable when you need to check performance regularly (and quickly!).
It’s also not possible to set monitoring thresholds or milestones and have health rolled up to shared team dashboards. Plus, the coloured Gauge tiles used to provide an easy view of whether we’re on track to hit targets aren’t offered in Jira.
There was no scope to combine Jira data with metrics from other tools for a complete view. Using SquaredUp to monitor our bug bashes means that for future sprints, we can view Jira ticket data alongside metrics from Azure DevOps and GitHub.
Solution
Once connected to Jira, we could instantly stream our most important metrics into one centralized dashboard so the whole team could check progress at a glance.
Josip and I can now quickly dip into the dashboard every morning, coffee in hand, and see how the team is progressing against targets.
Being able to visualize how many bugs we’re closing in relation to our targets, without multiple clicks, saves us a lot of time, and the automatic refresh means we can trust that the data is always up to date.
The coloured Gauge tiles mean we can instantly see which of our teams and targets are on track, and with monitoring enabled on each tile, we can roll status up to shared team dashboards and workspaces.
For the sub-teams, having a central dashboard to track team performance adds a competitive edge, meaning they stay engaged with the competition, have fun, and maybe even work a little harder (😉).
Dashboard walk-through
The running total shows the number of bugs closed throughout the 2-week bug bash compared to our team target, and the bugs closed in the last sprint. We chose to visualize this with a line graph so we can easily see how tickets increase over time and compare that to how many we’re closing.
The total bugs bashed Gauge visualization shows the combined number of bugs closed across all teams in relation to our target.
We’ve smashed it this time, so for the next bug bash sprint, we’d like to enable notifications to Slack and email so that everyone is alerted when we hit target, and can celebrate as a team.
Two simple Scalar tiles on the top right of the dashboard show the total number of bugs closed at our last bug bash, and our target for this one.
The Scalar tile allows us to visualize our targets as simple, singular values that require no interpretation, which isn’t offered natively in Jira.
The four coloured Gauge tiles at the centre of the dashboard show the total number of bugs closed per team. These allow me and Josip to quickly spot which teams are on track to hit target, and encourages some healthy competition.
You’ll notice that targets differ between teams to allow for varying team sizes, so we decided not to enable notifications on these tiles.
Below each Gauge tile is a breakdown of the total number of bugs closed per person, represented in simple Scalar tiles again.
Splitting out total bugs bashed by team helps keep individuals accountable and adding a competitive element didn’t hurt either!
All in all, this “bug bashboard” provided us Engineering Directors with the overview we needed, and added a bit of fun to the project. We’ll definitely be using something similar at the next bug bash!
Create your free dashboard
This “bug bashboard” is not available out of the box, but you can easily build something similar yourself using the Jira plugin.
Simply create a free account to get started, or check out this video to see how easy it is to use our Dashboard Designer:
To see what other dashboards you can create, check out our Dashboard Gallery.