Progress Dashboard (Agile)

You can use the Progress dashboard to track team progress toward completing an iteration. This dashboard displays four reports that help you monitor progress, burndown, and issues.

Required Permissions

To view the dashboard, you must be assigned or belong to a group that has been assigned the Read permissions in SharePoint Products for the team project. To modify, copy, or customize a dashboard, you must be assigned or belong to a group that has been assigned the Members permissions in SharePoint Products for the team project. For more information, see Add Users to Team Projects.

To modify a report in Office Excel, you must be a member of the TfsWarehouseDataReaders security role in SQL Server Analysis Services. You must also be assigned or belong to a group that has been assigned the Members permissions in SharePoint Products for the team project. For more information, see Grant Access to the Databases of the Data Warehouse for Visual Studio ALM.

To view a work item, you must be a member of the Readers group or your View work items in this node permission must be set to Allow. To create or modify a work item, you must be a member of the Contributors group or your Edit work items in this node permission must be set to Allow. For more information, see Managing Permissions.

Data Displayed in the Dashboard

You can use the Progress dashboard to understand how much progress the team is making toward completing user stories, tasks, and issues. Specifically, this dashboard displays the Web parts that the following illustration shows and that the following table describes.

For more information about how to interpret, update, or customize the charts that appear in the Progress dashboard, see the topics that are listed in the following table.

Web part	Data displayed	Related topic
	A visual representation of the cumulative count of all hours that the team spent on all tasks for the past four weeks. The Ideal Trend line calculates a slope or trajectory for when work will be completed based on the amount of work remaining and the end date of the report. The line is drawn from the remaining work on the start date to intersect the x-axis on the end date.	Burndown Excel Report
	A visual representation of the cumulative count of all active and closed tasks for the past four weeks.	Task Progress Excel Report
	A visual representation of the cumulative count of all user stories, grouped by their state, for the past four weeks.	User Story Progress Excel Report (Agile)
	Line chart that shows the rolling average of the number of Issues that the team has opened and closed for the past four weeks. The rolling average is based on the seven days before the date for which it is calculated.	Issue Trends Excel Report
	Team Web Access list of active issues.	Issues Workbook
	List of upcoming events. The list is derived from a SharePoint Web part.	Not applicable
	Count of active, resolved, and closed work items. You can open the list of work items by clicking each number. This list is derived from a Team Web Access Web part.	Work Items and Workflow (Agile)
	List of recent builds and their status. You can view more details about a specific build by clicking it. This list is derived from a Team Web Access Web part.	Managing and Viewing Completed Builds
	List of the most recent check-ins. You can view more details about a specific check-in by clicking it. This list is derived from a Team Web Access Web part.	Using the Check In and Pending Changes Windows

Required Activities for Tracking Progress

For the reports that appear in the Progress dashboard to be useful and accurate, the team must perform the following activities:

• Define user stories, tasks, and issues.

• Specify and update the Completed and Remaining fields for each Task as the team works on it.

  Importante

  If you subdivide a task into subtasks, specify hours only for the subtasks. These hours are rolled up as summary values for the parent task and user story.

• Update the State of each task, user story, and issue as it progresses from Active to Closed.

• (optional) Specify the Iteration and Area paths for each work item if you want to filter by those fields.

Tracking an Iteration

By using the Progress dashboard, product owners and the team can view the team's progress and determine whether the team is making enough progress, delivering value by closing user stories, and implementing the iteration based on the iteration plan.

For more information about how to customize the Progress dashboard and the types of questions to ask based on the indicators that appear within the dashboard, see the following sections:

• Modify the Task Burndown Report for an Iteration

• Monitoring Progress

• Monitoring Issues

Modify the Task Burndown Report for an Iteration

To track an iteration by using the Progress dashboard, you must modify the Task Burndown report in Office Excel to reflect the start date for your iteration. By default, the start date is five days before the current date.

To modify the Task Burndown report to correspond to a specific iteration

1. In the dashboard navigation panel, click Excel Reports.

2. Check out the Burndown file.

3. On the Reports worksheet, click the down arrow in the cell to the right of Work Item.Iteration Hierarchy, expand the selections, and then select the check box of the iteration that you want to track.

4. (Optional) Click the down arrow in the cell to the right of Work Item.Area Hierarchy, expand the selections, and then select the check box of the product area that you want to track.

5. In the cell under Date, specify the start date of the time interval in either mm/dd or mm/dd/yyyy format.

6. Click the cell that contains the start date that you just specified, and then drag the fill handle across the cells that you want to fill.

7. (Optional) Use the Auto Fill Options button to specify how to fill the selection.

   For example, you can specify Fill Series or Fill Weekdays. For more information, see the following page on the Microsoft Web site: Fill data in worksheet cells.

8. Click the Data tab.

9. In the Connections group, click Refresh All, and verify that the report is refreshed.

10. Save and close the report.

11. Check in the report to the SharePoint site.

12. Return to the Progress dashboard, and refresh your browser window to display the most recent reports.

Monitoring Progress

To monitor team progress, you can review the Task Burndown (hours), Task Progress (count), and User Story Progress (count) reports for the following types of indicators:

• Has Completed Work stopped increasing in the Task Burndown (hours) report?

  One or more issues might be blocking progress or the team might not be resolving and closing work items that it has completed, fixed, and verified.

• Has the number of active Tasks or active or resolved user stories stopped increasing?

  This situation warrants additional investigation. When the team appears to make no progress over several days in either the Task Progress (count) or User Story Progress (count) reports, the team might be blocked or the team might not be resolving and closing work items that it has completed, fixed, and verified. You should investigate the cause because it could hinder the team's ability to meet the iteration plan and project schedule.

• Is the team adding or expanding the scope of work during the iteration?

  Significant increases over time to the amount of Remaining Work or to the number of active tasks or user stories may indicate poor estimations or scope creep. That is, either the team did not accurately estimate the work at the start of the iteration or the team added features after the iteration started. When required effort is larger than estimated effort, team members might be underestimating the difficulty, time, or other factors. You should investigate the root causes. For example, you might want to determine how granular the tasks are.

• Do changes in the reports match your expectations?

  Dashboard reports reflect work that the team is tracking. You should expect the reports to change according to the decisions and changes that the team makes about the work. If the team reallocates work to another iteration or decides to add work for an iteration, reports on the Progress dashboard should reflect those decisions.

If the slope of the Remaining Work is progressing near or under the Ideal Trend line, the team is executing well against the iteration plan. However, if the Remaining Work slope is higher than the Ideal Trend line, the team will probably not complete all planned tasks before the end of the iteration.

Monitoring Issues

Because issues can block or impede team progress, you should track them as the team identifies them, and you should monitor how quickly the team addresses them. You can use the 7-Day Issue Trend Rate and the Open Issues report to review any issues that have an impact on the team. Specifically, you can find answers to the following questions:

• How often is the team identifying issues?

• Is the team resolving issues as quickly as it is identifying them?

If the team identifies more issues than it can address, the Issue Trends report will show that the team is closing issues at a lower rate. The team might need to reexamine priorities to determine whether the issues are actually problems that it should address or if it can ignore them.

See Also

Concepts

User Story (Agile)

Issue (Agile)

Task (Agile)

Create and Modify Areas and Iterations

Dashboards (Agile)

Artifacts (Agile)