Issue Trends Excel Report

  • Article

You can use the Issue Trends report to track the rate at which the team is finding and resolving Issues. This report shows the average number of Issues in each state over time. For information about how to access this report, see Excel Reports (Agile).

Note

You can view the Issue Trends report from the Progress dashboard. You can access this dashboard only if your team project portal has been enabled and is provisioned to use Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. For more information, see Access a Team Project Portal and Process Guidance.

In this topic

Related topics

  • Data in the Report

  • Interpreting the Report

  • Customizing the Report

Required Permissions

To view the report, you must be assigned or belong to a group that has been assigned the Read permissions in SharePoint Products for the team project.

To modify or customize the report, you must be a member of the TfsWarehouseDataReaders security role in SQL Server Analysis Services. You must also be assigned or belong to a group that has been assigned the Members permissions in SharePoint Products for the team project. For more information, see Grant Access to the Databases of the Data Warehouse for Visual Studio ALM and Managing Permissions.

Data in the Report

The Issue Trends report calculates a rolling average of the number of Issues that the team has opened, resolved, and closed for the past four weeks. The rolling average is based on the seven days before the date for which it is calculated. More precisely, the report averages the number of Issues in each state for each of the seven days before the date and then the divides the result by seven.

7-Day Issue Trend Excel Report

You can use the Issue Trends report to understand the volume of Issues that the team is identifying and addressing. This report is based on a PivotChart report that shows the last four weeks of data that is captured for Issues and that is stored in the data warehouse.

For the Issue Trends report to be useful and accurate, the team must perform the following activities:

  • Define Issues.

  • Close the State of each Issue as the team addresses it.

  • (optional) Specify the Iteration and Area paths for each Issue if you want to filter by that field.

Interpreting the Report

You can review the Issue Trends report to determine whether the team is addressing the Issues that it is identifying. Specifically, you can find answers to the following questions:

  • How often is the team identifying Issues?

  • Is the team resolving Issues as quickly as they are identifying them?

If the team identifies more Issues than it can address, the Issue Trends report will show that the team is closing Issues more slowly. The team might need to reexamine priorities to determine whether the Issues are actually problems that it should address or if the team can ignore them.

Customizing the Report

You can update the Issue Trends report by opening it in Office Excel and changing the filter options for the PivotTable report. You can customize this report to support other views as the following table describes.

View

Action

Issue trends for an iteration

Change the filter for Iteration (default=All)

Issue trends for a product area

Change the filter for Area (default=All)

Issue trends for the last six, eight, or more weeks

In the Columns PivotTable Field List, replace @@Last 4 weeks@@ with a different Set

For more information about how to work with and customize PivotTable and PivotChart reports, see the following pages on the Microsoft Web site:

See Also

Concepts

Issue (Agile)

Progress Dashboard (Agile)

Create and Modify Areas and Iterations

Artifacts (Agile)

Other Resources

Excel Reports (Agile)