Introducing our Agile Dashboard

The Accelerated Delivery Platform’s (ADP) Agile Dashboard is a pragmatic and publicly available tool (free) for managing project progress online. The Agile Dashboard was originally intended to manage progress for our agile projects, but these day it is used in a much broader perspective.

As the ADP Core Team receives a lot of questions about it, it’s time to present a small introduction here, including future directions.

Administrating projects

The Agile Dashboard simply administrates projects, project teams, work packages and work items. Furthermore, the Agile Dashboard allows you to define statusses your work items go through. In a typical Scrum project you will likely have ToDo, Working and Done. In a typical Smart project this will likely be New, InIteration, Working, Testing, Rework, Done, Dropped.

Projects

Managing work items

Work items such as user storie or features can either be added manually, or via a straightforward import feature that allows UML models to be imported in the Dashboard (from XMI). As Smart projects evolve around implemeting smart use cases, use cases can be marked as work items automatically. For each work item the complexity of the item needs to be established. Whem importing a UML model using smart use case stereotypes, establishing complexity is automatically handled.

Work items

The actual Dashboard

The main page in the Dashboard shows the progress of your project’s work items, or a the work items in a single work package, as shown below. This page will give you an immediate overview of the project.

Dashboard

When a work item changes status, e.g. when development is done, the user can drag-and-drop the work item to te next status, in this case for instance Testing. This pop-ups a next page where the user can add comments, and give an estimate for the amount of work still needed on the work item. Note that this is typically an action that is done during stand-up meetings.

Real-time burn-down

This information is used by the Agile Dashboard to recalculate the burn-down chart for the project real-time.

Burn down

The freely available Agile Dashboard offers very basic functionality and does not excel in abundant charting and progress reporting. This is done to make managing progress in projects as easy as possible – albeit the Dashboard could do with some minor useability improvements.

Using the Agile Dashboard thus presents real-time project progress. It’s online availibility makes it suitable for distributed scenarios, e.g. in offshore – we e.g. manage projects with it that are executed on several locations simultaneuously in the Netherlands and India.

Adding one and one

The current version of the agile dashboard, although of great use to projects, is somewhat limited, as it was not designed for (branded) use by different organization. True multi-site, branding and extensive reporting therefore lack, as does a rich internet user interface.

We are currently in the process of re-modeling our Agile Dashboard (new more sexy name pending). We think it should implement the following features:

  • Autorization using open mechanism, such as OpenID.
  • First use by new organizations granted by administrator to avoid fakes, possibly using Yammer-like mechanism.
  • Organizations can set up their own projects and project teams, similar to current version of dashboard. Possibly allow branding.
  • Organiszations can set up template projects, we currently supply both Smart and Scrum, but can easily also support RUP or even linear development.
  • Organizations can set up their own estimation scale, we currently supply the smart estimation scale.
  • Organizations can set up their own product life cycle, we supply smart use case life cycle, similar to current version of dashboard..
  • Import of work items / smart use cases from Excel, UML XMI. Organizations can set their own work items types, similar to current version of dashboard..
  • Project dashboard with drag-and-drop work items progress, similar to current version of dashboard.
  • New, more user-friendly user interface, built in Silverlight.
  • Real-time burn-down charts and other reporting, similar to current version of dashboard, but realized using Silverlight charting library.
  • Simple mobile client for tracking work item progress, possibly even an open service API.
  • Possibly integration of dashboard with Team Foundation Server.

We hope to start working on the new version real soon.

3 thoughts on “Introducing our Agile Dashboard

  1. Hi,
    You say the Dashboard is publicly available, but i cannot find a way to register. Is it really open at the moment, or maybe this is planned to come in a near future.

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