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Not answered This looks great....but is it worthless??

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  • Russell avatar

    Posted on Nov 12, 2010 (permalink)

    Hey guys.
    This tool is very, very cool.
    Kudos to you all for putting it together and offering it to the TFS community. We need a tool like this really bad.

    Last night we put this tool in place and threw it up on a big screen with great hopes about it.
    What we started to find though, was that the most critical configuration settings we needed were not possible (or we just havent found how to do it yet).

    For example, on the dashboard, the very first thing we looked for was the setting to set which Iteration Path the dashboard charts/data were going to expose for us. This setting doesnt exist. We can select a project ...but it is the ENTIRE project, not a sprint or iteration path at at time.
    Then we were messing around with the WIM, and then came back to the PD. The PD now has some text showing the current iteration, but the data in the Widgets definitely is not for that same iteration (except the iteration progress bar). So now the PD is a mixed hybrid of data that is confusing and useless.  What am I missing here?  It seems like this PD would naturally give a dashboard of any Iteration path the team/program wanted to watch.

    Next problem.
    We then wanted to make sure that individual teams could use this...not just one big project view. This seems like the natural intent of the tool since it is scrolling through users and showing individual statistics. This makes sense for a team (4-20 people). So we tried to find the setting to make the PD team-centric. We cannot find a way to set the PD for a specific Area Path anywhere. So again, the data is not usable to a team either.

    These seem like the most obvious and first-step settings to have. Am I missing something??

    The same problem continues in the WIM.  We wanted badly to use the planning tool. But when we went to use it, it automatically filled the capacity bucket with work from other teams using other area paths. We expected to have an empty bucket for our Area Path/Iteration Path combo...and then start dragging work in. There was no way for a single team to do their planning work.
    Again, this seems very odd since this is what this tool is for.

    Is it possible that this tool is only good for a single project with a single team (using Area Path)?

    I really hope there is some settings or config I am missing somewhere, cuz this thing looks SOOOO cool up on our 50" LCD on the wall.
    But as it stands right now, it is only a teasing eye-candy  :)

    Thanks in advance for any help you can provide

    Reply

  • Joel Joel admin's avatar

    Posted on Nov 17, 2010 (permalink)

    Hi Russell,

    Thanks for taking the time to provide us with this feedback.  As you may have discovered, the dashboard uses the iteration schedule from WIM to determine what the current iteration is.  If a current iteration can't be found, it just shows data for the whole project.  However, not all widgets filter their data by the current iteration.  Below is a list of the widgets that do.

    Activity Board
    Current Activities
    Iteration Effort
    Iteration Progress
    Remaining Work Trend
    Team Activities
    Team Progress

    Also, at this time there is no way to make the dashboard or WIM more "team" centric, though this item is in our backlog.  Using an area to filter the dashboard or the planning tool could be a good way to achieve this.

    Regards,
    Joel
    the Telerik team
    Do you want to have your say when we set our development plans? Do you want to know when a feature you care about is added or when a bug fixed? Explore the Telerik Public Issue Tracking system and vote to affect the priority of the items

    Reply

  • Chris Adams avatar

    Posted on Dec 14, 2010 (permalink)

    Hey there-

    I'm not sure if this will help but I did a couple of blogs on this topic - http://blogs.technet.com/b/chrad/archive/tags/telerik+tfs+project+dashboard/

    It should share the details you are looking for!

    Hope this helps,
    -Chris

    Reply

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