Manage and Enhance a Successful Agile Release Using Embedded Analytics
The software release process has improved at most companies. This has led to businesses running smoothly and delivering software on time. In Agile, managers faced challenges in managing the release operation. This includes tracking tasks, status, products, components, leads, and more, which has prevented managers from effectively meeting market demand on time.
Embedded analytics applications help managers easily track the performance of the release process. It gives clear workflow data to easily manage and improve areas of weakness. It is reliable and accessible at any time. It helps track and monitor the stages of the workflow and has become a faster tool for controlling releases. In this blog post, I am going to guide you through the following subtopics that are impacted by applying embedded analytics in a daily work application:
- What is embedded analytics?
- Benefits of embedding a release management dashboard
- Bold BI’s Release Management dashboard example
- How to embed analytical tools into an apps
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. It helps you work productively to do releases progressively in time to have a better marketing strategy.
Benefits of embedding a release management dashboard
Using embedded analytics, various benefits boost your releases by giving you insight and control. Some key benefits include:
- Monitoring team performance
- Enhancing release development
- Improving project planning
- Holistically managing releases
Monitoring team performance
Embedded analytics helps project managers track KPIs such as completed story points by sprint, completed sprints, total and remaining sprints, tasks completed, and more. These metrics allow project managers to follow the work done by teams in each sprint on a project. It gives insight into how each team performs and delivers per task. By having this knowledge, the administration can know their teams from every department well and work as one to increase production. This will also increase performance.
Enhancing release development
New releases invite new users. Such releases come with new features and extended operation quality. Embedded analytics helps in the development process by tracking key metrics such as product release, components, number of issues caused by a release, number of incidents caused by a release, percent of all changes that end up causing significant incidents, number of rollbacks, and more. With this insight, teams can easily identify areas of improvement to better their product. They can also determine areas of weakness in their operation and work to fix them before beginning a new project. In the product release process, a team can track components to use to increase efficiency. Using these embedded analytics insights enhances release development to produce quality and functional products for customers, leading to increased customer satisfaction with the company.
Improving project planning
Embedded analytics helps team leads track past and current projects to compare their result to plan future projects. It tracks metrics such as release expense, project cost, downtime, estimated release downtime, actual release downtime, errors, mean time to repair, and more. This knowledge allows team leads to plan progressively and steadily for future releases. It helps them make wise decisions regarding time, resources, and skills needed for a project’s success. From challenges experienced in past and current projects, the team ensures measures be put into place to avoid experiencing similar problems. Working with embedded analytics helps a team operate smoothly to improve an organization’s project-handling capabilities.
Holistically managing releases
Embedded analytics gives managers an overview of the release process. It provides a holistic view of the release to ensure the process is fruitful to the users and the company. It also enables managers to track KPIs such as on-time delivery, release delivered on schedule by application, releases delivered on schedule by priority, production issue open-close rates, release overview, and more.
Having insight into these key metrics, managers can have an overview of the project’s operation clearly and control the process diligently for the company to have better returns. It also provides managers with information to visually build production teams strongly and independently. This allows managers to manage expenditures and utilize resources wisely to expand the business to attract more customers, competing boldly in the current market.
Bold BI’s Release Management dashboard example
Embedding a release management dashboard example helps product managers track the status of different product releases via metrics like release start date vs. rollout date, days remaining for release, total hours worked, total completed tasks, and completed story points. Also, the dashboard can track task count and story points by components and sprints.
Using a release management dashboard, you can learn about the following key metrics to ease your planning and improve projects. Primary key metrics include:
- Start date
- Release date
- Days remaining for release
- Total worked hours
- Completed tasks
- Completed sprints
- Completed story points
- Summary by component
- Tasks by priority
- Release status
- Completed story point trend by sprint
- Tasks by type
Start date
This card widget shows the date of the beginning of a release. It tracks the period taken to accomplish a release.
Release date
This card widget shows the release date for a selected release and component. It marks the final date of delivery.
Days remaining for release
This card widget shows the days remaining for a release. It gives an update on the release deadline.
Total worked hours
This card widget shows the total hours worked. It monitors the time taken to do tasks.
Completed tasks
This card widget shows the number of completed tasks. It tracks the number of tasks completed per stage.
This KPI card widget shows the number of total, completed, and remaining sprints.
This card widget shows the number of completed story points. It helps team leads know the number of story points used per stage.
Summary by component
This grid shows each component’s planned and completed story points along with the completion percentage. It helps teams work effectively by going with the plan to complete tasks within the provided time.
Tasks by priority
This column chart shows the total of planned and completed tasks counted by low, medium, and high priority. It helps team leads easily monitor work progress and manage tasks by priority.
Release status
This doughnut chart shows task count proportion according to status. It shows a percentage so teams know the status of the release.
Completed story point trend by sprint
This line chart shows the trend of completed story points by sprint. It helps product managers easily track workflow completion by story points for early project completion.
Tasks by Type
This bar graph shows the total planned and completed tasks by type: bug, story, and technical blog. It helps the technical team easily track their work and plan wisely for the next project to achieve their goal.
To learn more about the key metrics used in this dashboard demo, refer to the Release Management Dashboard.
How to embed analytics tools into an app
Let’s see how analytics can be embedded into your company’s web applications. Bold BI can embed your dashboards in apps for more than 18 web platforms, including React with ASP.NET Core, React with Go, WinForms, Node.js, Vue with Go, and Vue with Core. In the rest of this blog, I am going to explain how to embed dashboards into your Angular applications. Consider a scenario in which your Agile team has a website 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 in your local machine and create a dashboard. You can find the installation and deployment steps in this documentation.
Step 1: Create an Angular application.
First, you need to create an Angular application. Create a new Angular project in Visual Studio Code and add the necessary ts files to the project, as shown in the following image.
For more guidance, refer to the sample code in the Bold BI documentation.
In this demonstration, the Angular application acts as the client, and an ASP.NET Core application acts as the server. You need to add several properties in the app.component.ts file, as shown in the following table and screenshot.
RootUrl : Bold BI dashboard server URL. For example: http://localhost:5000/biSiteIdentifier : For Bold BI, it should be something like “site/site1”. For the Bold BI Cloud Analytics Server, it should be an empty string.Environment : Your Bold BI application environment. If using the Bold BI Cloud Analytics Server, you should use “cloud.” If using Bold BI, you should use “enterprise.”User Email : The Bold BI server will use an email address to authorize the authorization server.
Step 2: Create a Bold BI instance.
You need to create a Bold BI instance to communicate between the server-side (any web application) and the client-side (Angular application), which allows you to embed a Bold BI dashboard in the Angular application.
Step 3: Create an authorization server to authenticate the Bold BI server.
Every application that embeds a Bold BI dashboard or widget must be authorized with the Bold BI server. This authentication step requires sending confidential information to the Bold BI server, such as users’ email addresses, group data, and embed signatures. So, in your server application, implement this authentication flow and provide the URL for connecting to your server in the Bold BI embedded instance.
Step 4: Run the Angular application to view the embedded dashboard.
In the Angular application, enter the authorization URL and dashboard URL that were defined in the ASP.NET Core application. 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 dashboard into your Angular application.
To learn more about embedding dashboards into your Angular applications, refer to this blog. You can also download the sample code used in the previous steps from our documentation.
Conclusion
Bold BI integrates dashboards into applications written in ASP.NET Core, ASP.NET MVC, Angular, ASP.NET, and Ruby on Rails. It will save time and prevent you from doing redundant work. Click this link to explore its features.
I hope now you have a better understanding of Bold BI and how it can help an Agile team be more successful in release 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 27, 2022.
