Optimizing Your Software Development Project Management With Data – Dashboard Example

In software development, the ability to quickly and efficiently deliver high-quality products is key to constantly meeting evolving customer needs.

For many teams, this means focusing on a flexible and iterative approach that enables rapid delivery, continuous improvement, and enhanced collaboration: development sprints.

But how do you plan, monitor, and optimize them?

That’s what we’ll dive in today, with a concrete internal use case. Discover how our team of developers uses ClicData to build development sprints, optimize resource allocation, enhance collaboration, and deliver new features you’ll love – aligned with our roadmap!

Using Data & Dashboard To Plan Sprints Based On Workload and Capacity

To plan realistic development sprints and prioritize tasks, Our CTO needed to assess the workload of the team both individually and collectively, as well as to gain visibility into the team’s capacity.

To do that, he needed a dashboard with data from YouTrack (our ticketing system), BambooHR (HR system), and the French Government API to include bank holidays.

Adjusting Our Software Development Planning

Our sprints are typically 40 days long. We start by assigning tasks on our ticketing system, adding them to the sprint, estimating the time required, and categorizing each ticket by type – feature or bug fix, required skills.

Then, we check the dashboard to ensure that the task and workload distribution is correct in terms of estimated time and bug/feature proportion. We also consider vacation days and holidays to adjust the sprint size based on each team member’s capacity.

To gain in visibility, we added a sprint filter that directly provides the number of remaining days:

We now have a clear picture of completed tasks, remaining workload based on ticket estimation factoring in each team member’s availability. In this example, we clearly see that one developer reached 100% of their capacity and only has 19 days left on this sprint; while the other highlighted developer have the bandwidth to absorb new tasks in the sprint if need be.

We can even drill-down into each developer’s workload to see which tickets are closed, in progress or incomplete and the estimated time by ticket.

Let’s say that a developer has completed one third of their tasks halfway through the sprint. That means we underestimated their workload. It could be due to various reasons: lack of information about the feature specifications or bug to fix, unfinished design, or any technical problems. With this dashboard, we can quickly see if someone’s running out of tasks to add more and advance on the roadmap or lift road blockers.

With this dashboard, we can also manage emergencies like customer requests. It any urgent and critical issues are raised, we can quickly absorb them based on team availability.

Improvements To Make Our Software Development Project Management Even More Agile

Dashboards are living beasts – they need to evolve!

We can imagine a few additions and improvements to our dashboard to make our software development and project management more agile:

• Setting up alerts when the estimated time is below the remaining sprint time. The developer will soon be blocked due to a lack of tickets.
• Adding actual time spent on tickets. That would give us great insights on whether we under or overestimated the time required on a particular item, to adjust future estimations.
• Tracking of tickets closed and re-opened multiple times. It could reveal a performance issue or an issue with the ticket scope, or even communication problem within the team.
• Visualizing ticket distribution by module. It would give us an overview of which module has been prioritized over another one and if it fits with our roadmap planning.
• Adding long-term planning. That would show us if a team is under pressure and reaches 100% over multiple sprints, but we’re behind schedule on the roadmap. This would trigger a conversation on whether we should postpone some features, or hire new software developers to develop them within the set timeframe.

Use ClicData For Your Own Project Management

This is just one example of what you can build with ClicData. We use our platform for all our internal reporting from sales and marketing, to finance and board meetings, but we thought this use case could help CTOs out there optimize their resource utilization with one simple dashboard.

Feel free to try it with your own team and share your thoughts and ideas with us here!