Trend reporting, a view of metrics or measures over time, is a valuable way of getting insight into project progress indicators such as defect arrival and closure, test progress and success, and so on.
In the Engineering Lifecycle Management (ELM) solution, the Data Warehouse (DW) provides a rich set of metrics, especially for work items. You might not realize that the Lifecycle Query Engine (LQE) also supports trend reporting, albeit on a smaller set of metrics. I recently published a Jazz.net article that describes trend reporting with LQE in more detail, including metrics for configurations. This post shares highlights from that article – hopefully enough to make you want to read the article in its entirety!
A key point to note: You must enable metrics collection for LQE by defining and scheduling one or more collection tasks. Collection can be resource-intensive, so it is disabled by default to ensure there is no impact to LQE performance. The LQE Administrator defines the tasks in the Data Metrics page of the LQE administration.
If you have enabled configuration management, your collection tasks must specify which configurations to calculate metrics for. To calculate metrics for non-enabled project areas, you need a separate task that does not specify any configuration.
The Jazz.net article lists the metrics available from LQE and the dimensions for each, which you can use to subdivide or group results or to set filtering conditions. It also provides more detail on defining collection tasks, authoring and running trend reports, and administration over time.
To summarize the recommended practices for using LQE trend reports:
- Be selective in which metrics you collect and for which configurations. Collect only what you will report on. You can define multiple collection tasks to be more granular in your selections.
- To minimize impact to the LQE server, schedule metric tasks to run when usage is low, and monitor LQE performance.
- Document and communicate what metrics you are collecting to report authors and users so they know what they can choose for their reports. If collection is not enabled for a configuration, running a trend report against it will yield no results.
- LQE calculates metrics only if the server is running; if the server is down for maintenance or another reason at the scheduled task time, the collection does not happen. If continuous collection is important, consider deploying a parallel LQE server to improve availability as described in the Jazz.net article “Scaling the configuration-aware reporting environment“.
- Follow general best practices for Report Builder in terms of limiting scope, naming and tagging conventions, and so on. Also consider what time range to apply: a longer time range means more data, which typically takes longer to load. Test your reports for performance.
- Review metrics tasks periodically to ensure they still reflect your needs, and disable or delete those you no longer require.
- For more extensive metrics for work items, consider using the DW. Even if you have enabled configuration management, you can still use the DW to report on unversioned artifacts and work items.
I encourage you to read the complete article on Jazz.net to understand the details and rationale behind these recommendations, and how best to leverage the trend reporting that LQE offers. Enjoy exploring!
fryerk (aka Kathryn Fryer) 