Standard reports

[Kevin Benton]

I hope not.  Here, we need those types of reports.

We're looking for things like:
Avg. Time to Resolution over a period (i.e. a week)
# of bugs reopened over a period
Time bug assigned to a particular group (TIQ)
Avg. Time to Assignment (from New) over a period
# of bugs in a group's queue
# of bugs resolved over a particular period
...

The period charts I'm planning to create in Crystal Reports will be to
measure performance over time such as # of bugs resolved per week over a
quarter, average TTR per week over a quarter, and so on...  Each of these
reports needs to have drill-down capability so that when a process anomaly
is found, a manager can dive into the information to find out what the
exceptions there are so they can accentuate the positive and correct the
negative.  It makes a lot of sense to me to have this type of metric
reporting in Bugzilla so that mangers have the information needed to
implement process improvement.

One of my favorite charts is a statistical process control chart to find
performance outside "acceptable norm's".  If performance is above the upper
control limit (UCL) or below the lower control limit (LCL), it's time to
investigate.  I use the formula UCL = avg + sqrt(target - avg) and LCL = avg
- sqrt(target - avg).  Avg represents the average performance over the
entire period.  Target represents the performance goal.  Then, I graph
performance in a bar chart with lines for the avg, UCL and LCL.  When
performance falls below the LCL or above the UCL, it's time to investigate
what went wrong or right.  By focusing on the hits, we increase the
frequency of the things we're doing right.  By locating problems in the
misses, we minimize their impact.  As we do this, we approach our target
with more consistency.  Notice that as the target is approached, the control
limits tighten up.

Does this work?  You bet it does.  While managing an operations team, I was
able to help my team find ways to improve their performance over 90% in
about a year through identifying and resolving weaknesses and celebrating
strengths in existing processes.  When I passed the information on to the
team members, they began to participate in the process improvement
themselves.  If we had simply focused on weakness, we would have achieved
similar results, however, it would have been more of a teeth-pulling
experience.  Because we celebrated success as well, we reached our goals
faster and the entire team was willing to participate.

Kevin

-----Original Message-----
From: developers-owner at bugzilla.org [mailto:developers-owner at bugzilla.org]
On Behalf Of kiko at async.com.br
Sent: Saturday, November 20, 2004 7:12 AM
To: developers at bugzilla.org
Subject: Re: Standard reports

On Fri, Nov 19, 2004 at 02:40:17PM -0800, Stuart Donaldson wrote:
> I then created a pre-defined reports page which allows selecting a 
> product, and a report for which it then will generate the report. It 
> uses a small modification  to buglist.cgi in order to load the query 
> based on the product selected and report selected, much like buglist.cgi 
> can load a named query.

It's an interesting approach; I thought of something different, which
I'll explain here. I have a long-term idea that we should have more
"domain-specific" pages in Bugzilla: a page for viewing a User, a page
for viewing a Product, a page for viewing a Group. These pages' main
goal would be to provide general information on the entity, with links
to ready-made reports and interesting statistics (for a Product,
answering the questions how many open bugs? how many all-time closed
bugs? can I see a full report of them?) and other entity-related tasks
(file a bug on this product, edit this product -- for admins).

This is a framework that I think would "bring out" a lot of the richness
that is hidden in Bugzilla, giving these entities homes instead of being
cut apart in half a dozen different pages. Bugzilla is very much
divided into tasks, and I would like to see it more divided into
concepts and then offering tasks upon those concepts. I think this
provides a better interaction model.

Bringing us back into the concrete world, by this I mean that I would
prefer seeing a page with links to ready-made reports kept as a template
(so it is rather easily customizable and reduces the requirement of Yet
Another Administrative Interface for these reports) in something like
show_product.cgi. 

Too blue-skyish?

Take care,
--
Christian Robottom Reis | http://async.com.br/~kiko/ | [+55 16] 3361 2331
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