Dashboard Zone

If you are done hating Dashboard Gauges let us move on to a different topic with no speedometers or thermometers (atleast for this Dashboard article).

Earlier we had given you What “Larry Ellison” is monitoring (oops..i just gave the clue). Don’t worry, if you are smart (and lazy) not to click on the above link here is what a CEO of a software company should be monitoring, why? Because the CEO of the largest Enterprise software company is doing it.

The above dashboard is useful only when you have a successful software company. What if you are just in the early stages of building a Successful software company?

Robert at Clearly And Simply has demonstrated how you can build a good Software Development/Project Dashboard.

• http://www.clearlyandsimply.com/clearly_and_simply/2009/11/software-project-dashboards-episode-1.html
• http://www.clearlyandsimply.com/clearly_and_simply/2009/12/software-project-dashboards-episode-2.html

When it comes to manage software development projects, you have to monitor a lot of different quantitative and qualitative metrics in order to answer the main question:

“Where are we?”

As in any other project you have to take care of the usual suspects in project controlling like the completion rate of tasks, the milestones and quality gates, the budget adherence, etc. In software development projects, however, there are a couple of very important specific additional facets to be monitored closely:

• The actual status and the trend of software defects
• The test progress, test coverage and test success
• The actual status and the development of change requests

Please visit Clearly and Simply for detailed steps on how to build this dashboard.

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