Improve Defect Management in Agile Using Bold BI Embedded Analytics
Introduction
Agile teams can find it difficult to track and prioritize defect issues, which can help them plan on how to fix those issues most efficiently. Scrum Masters can also face difficulties in estimating the total amount of time it will take to completely resolve an issue and the total number of resources needed, making it difficult for them to predict their future performance. This can lead to losing customers.
Embedded analytics helps in tracking defect management processes, allowing Scrum Masters to have an overview of how well they’ve integrated defect management into their Agile framework. They can embed a defect management dashboard, tracking key metrics and KPIs. In this blog, I will give you an overview of how to improve your defect management with Bold BI:
- What is embedded analytics?
- Benefits of embedding a defect management dashboard
- Bold BI’s Agile dashboard example
- How to embed Bold BI analytics tools into an app
What is embedded analytics?
Embedded analytics is integrating analytical solutions and data visualization capabilities into a software application’s user interface to improve data comprehension and usability. Bold BI helps you easily embed an analytics solution into your everyday work applications using a JavaScript SDK and server application.
Benefits of embedding a defect management dashboard
Tracking bugs in your projects and solving them earlier benefits your customers, product managers, and development teams. With defect management dashboard metrics, you can monitor the total created bugs and resolved bugs by project, confirmed bugs in a software application during development, and total defect counts by category to gain insight into your processes. Let’s look at how defect management can benefit from an embedded defect management dashboard:
- Improves product quality
- Improves testing procedures
- Helps prioritize work in sprints
Improves product quality
Providing quality products and services to customers is one of the best ways to maintain their loyalty to your business. Part of the way Agile teams make this possible is by creating a process for managing defects in their products, to ensure that the end-product is of high quality. With metrics such as defect density, defects gap percentage, and defects by type, product managers can quickly track and identify the frequency of different kinds of issues in their products. They can look for larger, underlying problems and for better solutions for fixing them before delivering new products to consumers. This allows them to reduce the cost of replacing damaged products.
Improves testing procedures
In the case of a software company, managers can use a defect management dashboard to see who is reporting the defects, and therefore how many levels of testing failed to recognize those defects. If they need to build more testing, or different kinds of testing, into their product development process, a chart will show product managers where in the process that testing is required. The errors that slip by your QA and UAT teams and inconvenience your customers might never amount to zero, but improvements can be made to their procedures to make each sprint more sucessful.
Helps prioritize work in sprints
A defect management dashboard helps the Agile team responsible for fixing defects to identify each reporter’s issue based on priority to determine how quickly each needs to be addressed. Security and safety issues, as well as other critical defects, will stand out, as well as patterns in how often and where defects are most commonly occurring. Scrum Masters can plan time and personnel for fixing defects into their future sprints with more accuracy and work the currently most important fixes into this or the next sprint.
Bold BI’s Agile dashboard example
Defect Management Dashboard
Embedding a dashboard like the Defect Management Dashboard helps product managers and defect management teams track key defect metrics such as defect density; escaped defect per module defect gaps percentage; defects by project, type and status; defect cycle time; and defects by reporter and priority.
Key metrics and KPIs
- Defect density
- Defects gap percentage
- Escaped defects
- Defects by project
- Defects cycle time
- Defects by type
- Defects by status
- Defects by reporter
- Total defects over time by priority
Defect density
This number card shows the number of confirmed bugs in a module during the development period divided by the module size.
Defects gap percentage
This number card shows the number of defects observed divided by the number of units tested.
Escaped defects
This KPI widget shows the total defects that were not identified by the quality control team this and last month. They were noticed by customers.
Defects by project
This column chart shows the comparison of the total bugs and resolved bugs by project.
Defects cycle time
This line graph shows the comparison of the planned versus actual bug fix times over the past six months. This helps in estimating and setting deadlines for similar bugs.
Defects by type
This pie chart shows the distribution of the total defects among functionality errors, communication errors, security bugs, and performance defects.
Defects by status
This doughnut chart shows the total defects by the current task status: closed, open, validated, in progress, and on hold. It helps in identifying the total number of pending tasks.
Defects by reporter
This bar chart shows the comparison of the reported defects count by reporter: the development team, the QA team, the UAT team, and the end-users.
Total defects over time by priority
This stacked bar chart shows the how the defects were distributed among the priority statuses critical, high, low, normal, and release breaker over the past six months.
To learn more about the metrics and KPIs used in this dashboard example, refer to the Defect Management Dashboard demo.
How to embed Bold BI analytics tools into an app
Let’s see how analytics can be embedded into your company’s web applications. Bold BI helps you embed your dashboards on 18 web platforms, including React with ASP.NET Core, React with Go, WinForms, Node.js, Vue with Go, Vue with ASP.NET Core, and more. In this section, I am going to explain how to embed dashboards in your ASP.NET MVC applications. Consider a scenario in which your team has a web app like the one shown in the following image.
You can embed dashboards easily using Bold BI and avoid building an analytics or BI solution yourself. Follow these steps to embed your dashboard successfully.
Prerequisites
Download and install the Bold BI Server on your local machine and create an enterprise-grade dashboard. You can find the installation and deployment instructions here.
Step 1: Create an ASP.NET MVC application.
To successfully embed a dashboard in your application, first, you need to have an application. Open Microsoft Visual Studio and click New Project. Then, choose ASP.NET MVC Web Application, enter a project name, and click OK.
Step 2: Configure embed properties.
After the ASP.NET MVC web application is created, you need to create a Model class called EmbedProperties under Models and provide the dashboard root URL, site identifier, environment, user email, and embed secret.
RootUrl : Bold BI dashboard server URL. Example: http://localhost:58094/bi.SiteIdentifier : For Bold BI, it should follow the format `site/site1`. For Bold BI Cloud Analytics Server, it should be an empty string.Environment : Your Bold BI application environment. If using Bold BI Cloud Analytics Server, you should use `cloud`. If using Bold BI, you should use `enterprise`.apiHost : An ASP.NET Core application would be run on http://localhost:5000/, which needs to be set as `apiHost`.
Step 3: Generate an embed secret.
You have to set the EmbedSecret for authentication. You can get the embed secret from the Bold BI Server. Then, navigate to the Settings icon in the left navigation bar and click the Embed tab. Click Enable embed authentication and then click Generate Secret to generate the embed secret. On clicking the button, a secret key will be generated, and you can paste it into the application. To learn how to do this in more detail, you can refer to this documentation link.
Note: Save the secret key, as it cannot be retrieved again. If you do not save it, you will have to generate a new one using the Reset Secret option.
Step 4: Create authorization server.
You need to implement an authorization server in the ASP.NET MVC application to get authenticated before embedding the dashboard from the Bold BI Server. You can also configure the single sign-on (SSO)-based authorization server, which is an authentication endpoint that enables users to securely authenticate multiple applications using unique embed secrets. This prevents the need for the user to log into different applications separately.
Step 5: Create a Bold BI instance.
Finally, create a Bold BI instance to load the dashboard using a JavaScript file. Reference required script files and CSS files in the HTML pages.
Step 6: Run the application to embed the dashboard.
After successfully creating the ASP.NET MVC application, you need to run it. It will be launched successfully with the dashboard details. Finally, you can see that the dashboard created in the Bold BI Server is embedded in your web application.
By following the previous steps, you can successfully embed your dashboards into your ASP.MVC application.
To learn more about embedding dashboards into your ASP.NET MVC applications, refer to this blog. You can also download the sample code used in the previous steps from our documentation.
Conclusion
Bold BI helps you integrate dashboards in your applications written in ASP.NET Core, ASP.NET MVC, Angular, ASP.NET, and Ruby on Rails. It will save you time and prevent you from doing redundant work. Click this link to explore its features. To learn more about embedding dashboards into your application, refer to this blog and our help documentation.
I hope now you have a better understanding of Bold BI and how it can help Agile teams be more successful in defect management. You can create a dashboard any way you like with Bold BI’s 35+ widgets and 130+ data sources.
Get started with Bold BI by signing up for a free 15-day trial and begin creating interactive business intelligence dashboards. You can contact us by submitting questions through the Bold BI website or, if you already have an account, you can log in to submit your support questions.
Originally published at https://www.boldbi.com on September 16, 2022.
