The Web Dashboards and Team Reports components of Rational Team Concert help you to keep tabs on the health of your project. Dashboards provide an at-a-glance view of work item queries, event feeds, reports, and other items that are critical to understanding your progress. Reports provide both real-time views and historical trends of builds, streams, work items, and other artifacts that your team works with.

Here is a list of Transparency and project health features:

• Track your progress using reports
• Reports are configurable by the process
• Exporting reports
• The data warehouse
• Build reports
• Work item reports
• Source control reports
• Repository and data warehouse reports
• Project health and team information at a glance
• Highly customizable
• Mini Dashboard
• Personal Dashboards
• Wiget Catalog
• See what others are working on
• Progressive Disclosure and drill-in

Track your progress using reports

The Team Reports component allows you to track various aspects of your project’s progress using reports. These reports are available both in the rich client and in the web UI. Rational Team Concert ships with a library of predefined reports that will allow you to get going with reporting right away.

To view a report in the Eclipse-based IDE client, expand the project area in the Team Artifacts view. Expand Reports > Shared Reports, and double-click to open a report from within one of the folders.

To view a report in the web UI, select the Reports menu in the top navigation area, select “Shared Reports”, and then select a report.

Reports are configurable by the process

Reports are configurable so that they reflect the process that your development team uses. Although Rational Team Concert contains a library of more than fifty pre-defined report templates, these are not all necessarily applicable to every way of working. In recognition of this fact, a list of reports may be specified in a process template so that all project areas created from this template will automatically contain the selected reports.

Exporting reports

While HTML is often a convenient way to view reports, many users will have requirements to view reports in alternative formats. The Team Reports component supports exporting any report to a variety of formats. The current list of supported formats includes PDF, PostScript, Excel, Word and PowerPoint. To export a report, first view it in the report viewer (either in the Eclipse-based IDE client or in the web UI). Select the Export toolbar action and specify an output format to save the file to disk.

The data warehouse

A data warehouse is a special database designed to store aggregated, historical data. This data can then be easily queried and used to discover trends and justify changes (or non-changes) based on those trends. The Reports component implements a data warehouse on the Jazz Team Server, which is populated daily with a plethora of data about many different artifact types, including work items, streams, and builds. In fact, many of the out-of-the-box reports included with Rational Team Concert use this data to provide historical trend charts (compare these charts with those that plot only the current state of the repository).

The data warehouse requires no configuration out of the box, and will automatically begin collecting data for the reports to present.

Build reports

The build is a central feature of many development teams, and a close eye is kept on it. When the build fails, people need to know why it failed and how to fix it. Over time, interested stakeholders would also like to know about the build’s record. How often does it fail? How long does it take to fix a broken build? What has caused it to break the most frequently? Is the build taking longer to complete than before? It is possible to answer these questions, and others, using a number of build-related reports, including Build Health, Code Coverage, Code Health, Frequent Test Failures, and Frequent Test Regressions.

Work item reports

Since a work item is the representation of a piece of real-world work in Rational Team Concert, it is a hot topic for reports. A wide array of work item trend reports allows you to view new or closed work items per day, or to compare open work items between teams, open work items by type, open vs. closed work items, and more. The sprint burndown and release burndown reports will be useful to teams using the Scrum methodology, as will the story points and team velocity reports.

Source control reports

While viewing progress as measured by work items is valuable, sometimes you want to drill in and actually understand how much code is being produced and shared with the team. The project activity report displays an over-time view of both change sets (for a larger granularity) as well as files and folders (for a finer granularity). You can even break these numbers down by component. The stream size report shows you the trend of the size of your stream over time, both with respect to the number of files and folders as well as the size on disk.

Repository and data warehouse reports

System administrators and other IT stakeholders who are interested in the health of the Jazz Team Server itself will find the repository and data warehouse reports useful. The metrics reports break down database content by item type, so you can see where the space is going and determine whether you understand the growth of the repository. The counters reports show the trend of server usage as measured by service calls. The data warehouse report shows a trend of the footprint of the snapshots in the data warehouse.

Project health and team information at a glance

Highly customizable

Mini Dashboard

Personal Dashboards

Widget Catalog

See what others are working on

Progressive disclosure and drill-in