Software Project Dashboards – Episode 3

How to create a Microsoft Excel dashboard to monitor the progress of a software development project (part 3 of 3)

This article is the last part of a 3 posts series on software development project dashboards with Microsoft Excel. Episode 1 of the series discussed a software defect statistic dashboard, Episode 2 talked about a test progress and test success dashboard. Today’s post focuses on monitoring change requests, one of the biggest threats to complex software projects.

Change requests (CR) raised already during the development of the software lead to additional time and cost needed, threaten the project plan and the budget, bear the risk of additional defects and lead to an instable baseline of the software to be tested by Quality Assurance. That’s why you should definitely keep an eye on the development of change requests throughout the development phase of your software project.

Today’s post provides a minimalist dashboard for monitoring and reporting the actual status of change requests and their development over time. As always including the Microsoft Excel workbook for free download.