Benefits For Your Organization

Insight – there is no better word for what Bugs Dashboard can do for your organization. Install it with the default dashboards and you will immediately have insight into the information locked away in Bugzilla. Tune the dashboards to your needs and you’ll get even deeper insights. Extend it with the Software Development Kit and you can unlock valuable information. Some of the insights which have benefited others include:

• Risk assessment – see where your priorities lie as a whole and within individual projects. Stop reacting to perception and start dealing with facts.
• Resource allocation – see where your bottlenecks are and help those who need it most. Star performers can be bottlenecks as easily as newbies. Each requires a different level of attention. Easily see who is carrying what load and how long they’ve been sustaining that pace.
• Validation – use your dashboards to validate what others are saying. Trust, but verify.
• Policy, Procedure, Training – verify that processes are being followed, change procedures if necessary and implement training when called for. The numbers tell a story, but sometimes it’s not the story you wish to hear. If you don’t like the numbers you’re seeing, change the way you write the story.
• Performance measurement – reward peformance, correct if required, but act with good insight.

Benefits For Your Customers

Confidence – you’re working hard to earn and retain the trust of your customer, now you can work with them in new ways to gain their confidence in your abilities. Everyone understands there can be bugs in even the most simple of software applications. The keys are finding those bugs early, exposing them so that they are not only fixed but serve as a learning opportunity, and refining the process to achieve a higher return on investment. Whether you are a consulting firm developing for hundreds of clients, an individual promoting your project, an open source community working towards a common goal, everyone actively developing software follows a process. The smart ones talk about their process and work with their customers to constantly refine and improve not only the processes, but the relationships.

Trust – it’s hard to trust someone who keeps secrets about your project. A customer is committed whether they are active day-to-day or reading status reports. Keep their trust by providing them with key information they can understand at-a-glance.

Here are some of the ways Bugs Dashboard can benefit your relationship:

• Open, effective communication – not everyone learns the same way which is why Bugs Dashboard presents the same information in several different visual tools. Some may spot differences in a table of numbers more easily than they can read a pie chart. For others, a thermometer does more to communicate results than a bar chart. Bugs Dashboard exposes the information, but lets you choose how to present it.
• Prioritization – getting a stake holder, expert user, subject matter expert, or lead authority to sit down and review a list of bugs to prioritize their relevance is necessary, but has to be performed in a very timely manner. Bugs Dashboard draws up all the bugs of a project and then allows you to interactively reorder them as appropriate. Discuss, reorder, submit – done! Whether priorities, severities or assignments, move through the list quickly and efficiently.
• Trust – the level of trust in a relationship goes up when the information is willing and openly shared. Future pain is most easily remidiated through action taken today. Working together, assess the information exposed by Bugs Dashboard and take the appropriate action.

Benefits For Project Managers

Verification – you want to trust, but you have to verify. You cannot afford to be caught by surprise and you cannot afford to disappoint. If you’re not actively developing, how do you verify that what you’re being told is the complete and accurate picture? Bugs Dashboard is impartial. It can help Project Managers verify that the position they believe the project is in relative to the quality of software and the progress of work is in line with reality. Any database can be manipulated, but with Bugs Dashboard exposing the details in concert with your processes and practices, your confidence in the position it reports can be much higher than simply relying on the word of others. Project managers can employ the tools within Bugs Dashboard easily to provide them with many benefits including:

• Scheduling – verify the amount of work and reach into the details if necessary to assess the complexity. Bugs Dashboard will provide you with the information against which you can assess your schedule. Using the information, you can adjust your schedule appropriately.
• Budgeting – exposing the information within Bugzilla can help you determine what resources you need to move, acquire or when you can expect to release them.
• Managing – as a Project Manager, you cannot afford to lose track of the forest for the sake of the trees in front of you. Bugs Dashboard will help you keep the big picture in mind while dealing with the day-to-day issues of your project.

Benefits For Development Teams

Validation – you try to communicate your concerns, you provide the necessary background, and yet it seems your efforts have fallen on deaf ears. Bugs Dashboard can help you effectively communicate your concerns by validating your facts through an interface that is easy for others to understand, even when they’re not intimate with the day-to-day development activities. It serves as an impartial third-party view into the information within Bugzilla allowing you to provide the interpretation of the numbers.

Extensibility – Bugs Dashboard provides a framework which is easily extended through our Software Development Kit. You can easily create new views into the data, add additional capabilities within widgets, and gather your favorite scripts and reports and add them to the framework. You can share your work with the Bugs Dashboard community (keep the source if you wish) or contain your work within your own organization.

• Extensible – download the free Software Development Kit, read the Developer’s Guide and start adding your favorite scripts and reports to Bugs Dashboard.
• Administration Suite Included – the creation and manipulation of dashboards can be accomplished by any user using the graphical drag-and-drop interface of the included Administration Suite.
• Easy Maintenance – tables to support Bugs Dashboard are installed into the same schema as Bugzilla (all begin with bd_) and thus are backed up everytime you backup the Bugzilla schema owner.