Clearly and Simply

Tag: dashboards

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.

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January 31, 2010
Software Project Dashboards – Episode 2

How to create a Microsoft Excel dashboard to monitor the progress of a software development project (part 2 of 3)

This is the second part of a 3 post series on software development project dashboards with Microsoft Excel. Episode 1 of the series discussed a dashboard to monitor the software defect statistics. Today’s article addresses to another very relevant facet in a software development project: The progress and success of testing.

Testing as the process of validating and verifying quality and suitability of the developed system is at least as important as the number of defects detected. Actually, it goes without saying that testing is the prerequisite of finding software defects. Having said this, it probably would have been better to start the series with this part, but I recognized this too late. My bad.

Anyway: Today’s post provides a minimalist dashboard to monitor test progress and test success within a software development project. As always including the Microsoft Excel workbook for free download.

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December 22, 2009
Software Project Dashboards – Episode 1
How to create Microsoft Excel dashboards to monitor the progress of a software development project (part 1 of 3)

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:
1. The actual status and the trend of software defects
2. The test progress, test coverage and test success
3. The actual status and the development of change requests
Today’s article is the first of a 3 post series on how to create minimalist, dynamic software project dashboards with Microsoft Excel; this time a software defect monitor dashboard including the Microsoft Excel workbook for free download.

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November 28, 2009
There is more than one way to heat a map
2D Tabular Heatmaps with Microsoft Excel

Inspired by a NY Times chart, Juice Analytics recently had a post and a discussion on bubble chart heat maps: Bubble, bubble toil and trouble. Chris Gemignani wrote:

“The first tool we tried, simply on principle, was Excel 2003. As expected, making a NY Times quality bubble chart in Excel 2003 is a hard problem.”

Juice Analytics is one of my favorite blogs on visualization and I learned a lot from the blog and website. But in this case I do not agree at all. And it seems as if I am not alone.

What had to come, came. Some of us – including myself – could not let this rest.
- I used Fabrice Rimlinger’s famous Sparklines for XL (free download here) and created a replica of the NY Times chart. Fabrice was kind enough to publish this on his blog (Yes, we can) and his own version with an improved visualization using bar charts (Stick to the classics?).
- Two days later my friend and Excel MVP Chandoo showed Visualizing Search Terms on Travel Sites, a bubble-chart solution with plain old Excel (no VBA).
- Last, but not least: Andreas Lipphardt of xlCubed was ahead of his times and had a post on creating heatmap tables with Excel based on bubble charts already in August 2008.
Conclusion: Yes you can. It is not a hard problem to create quality heat maps with Microsoft Excel.

But let’s take one step back. What if you don’t want to use the size of the bubbles for visualization? What if you want to create a classic heat map, i.e. the higher the value, the darker the fill color of the cell and vice versa? Following a definition like the one on Wikipedia:

“A heat map is a graphical representation of data where the values taken by a variable in a two-dimensional map are represented as colors.”

Can you create a classic 2-dimensional tabular heatmap with Microsoft Excel as well?

Yes, you can. And there is more than one way to skin the cat. This post shows the different options and includes all examples for free download.

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February 10, 2009
Lithuania at a glance

A Data Analysis and Dashboard Showcase with Microsoft Excel

This post is about a showcase. Don’t expect too much. I will not provide a detailed how-to tutorial. All you can learn from this post is that you should not toss Excel as a matter of principle, when you have to create Business Intelligence tools and dashboards. Agreed, Excel has its limitations especially with regards to the access to larger external databases. And Excel’s chart engine has some limitations as well. Nevertheless Excel provides the flexibility to create compelling and professional dashboards.

Recently a Lithuanian company invited me to conduct a training to their marketing department. The focus of this training shall be on how to create Excel models including dashboards and visualizations made to stick. I haven’t done trainings for quite a while, but I do remember that the perfect start for a training is a demonstration of what it will be about and what the participants will be able to do afterwards. Therefore I created a showcase based on the Lithuanian Census 2001.

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January 26, 2009