Dashboard, KPI & Stats tool

[tookei]

Hello folks,

What tools do you use ?

I've been developing a lot of mantis plugins for my ex-company, and all the projects around stats were totally awful.
Below, some examples:

1. Calcule KPI based on history: the badest way, because an update of a label (i.e. status) won't update history table and could provide wrong results
2. Daily export in EXCEL files: the short-term limited solution which will bring some frustration later (trust me, I have deal with it )
3. Cron task for KPI processing: the geekest way, it could work for few KPIs, but this solution is unscalable

Now, I think I have a better idea of how to figure out all of that. So I'm really excited to announce you that I'm working a cool app on my own.

And MantisBT will be my first target for sure

mantis dashboard.png (239.59 KiB) Viewed 2141 times

I would be happy to read your expectations for a such king of tool!

Be ready to discover what your data is hiding

Kind Regards,
Tookei

[atrol]

Calcule KPI based on history: the badest way, because an update of a label (i.e. status) won't update history table

I can't reproduce this. Updating status updates the history table. Can you provide some more information how to reproduce it?

[tookei]

Can you provide some more information how to reproduce it?

Hi Atrol,

As the fields old_value and new_value of the table mantis_bug_history_table are both VARCHAR, the value will be the label/text of the field_name.
For example, at Day1, the status labels are NEW, ASSIGNED, DONE, CLOSED. During the next days, for an issue, its history could be :
NEW => ASSIGNED
ASSIGNED => DONE
DONE => CLOSED

At Day100, the status labels are updated to NEW, IN PROGRESS, DONE, CLOSED. The ASSIGNED status value in the history won't be updated to IN PROGRESS. So if we would like to count the number of issues per day for each current status, we might lost all X issues during Day1 to Day100 for IN PROGRESS status.

[Gltrsc]

I would be happy to read your expectations for a such king of tool!

Hi Tookei,

Very interesting project you got there! I'm also looking for a way to extract stats from Mantis, and it's been pretty unsuccessful so far.

The trickiest part is for me to track how quick users are to deal with bugs; for now, I'm trying to compute how long a bug was associated with a group of users (something along the lines of [timestamp of when the mantis was assigned to user A] minus [timestamp of when the mantis was then assigned to user B]). But it's very primitive .

Have you already tackled this kind of need in the past ?

[tookei]

Hi Gltrsc,

Do you want to track the efficiency of your team ?
Sure, in my ex-company, we tried to understand the nature of our bugs and find out who is the best for this or for that.

There are many solutions for you

• Computing script directly connected to your database
• Computing script based on Mantis API
• Dedicated Plugin
• My app [ the easiest way, but still under development ]

Feel free to PM me for more details.

Cheers,
Tookei

[Gltrsc]

Hi Tookei,

Yes, essentially I'm trying to compute the number of work hours spent so far by a group of users on any Mantis, compared to another group of users (like a team race if you will, the faster the better ).

So far I could only do it by hand, ticket by ticket: I'm exporting to excel a SELECT table where bug_id=[ticket number] AND field_name=handler_id FROM mantis_bug_history_table, then translate the date_modified timestamps into dates, then compare the dates, compute the work hours equivalent, and SUM the hours based on the user_id...

It's a very rough process; it works for one or two, but I have many so I'm looking for a way to automate the calculation and generalise it to all tickets at once!

And I'm pretty desperate by now

[cas]

Why so cumbersome? All could be done in a PHP script.....
In addition, you have the option to administer active time spent within Mantis which makes it even easier

[tookei]

Why so cumbersome? All could be done in a PHP script.....

By experience, PHP script is a hack way when you want to do something one shot, fast to deploy and regardless maintainability.
When you need to deal with stats and history, it's better to use right technology which allow you to scale your app according to your future need.

In addition, you have the option to administer active time spent within Mantis which makes it even easier

AFAIK, this option allows to know the time for an issue, but not the time per assigned person who's get involved.

[cas]

Time is registered through the notes so you can see who registered the time which is what you want. Plus it is more accurate since in most cases people will not work full day on an issue. Perhaps an additional overview needs to be created (another php script ).

[tookei]

@cas
In others words, we need to have a tool

By the way, it seems that you are a mantis veteran user, it would be great to have you feedback on this topic.
Are the built-in stats enough ? Or do you use something else to highlight more interesting KPI ?

[cas]

For our company I also have made some tailor made scripts, never got around to make a real plugin for it.

The story is that users are experts in asking just that report which is not available so that is why i developed a very flexable, integrated, tool.
What I use is my query plugin in combination with phpexcel (creation of excel sheets using php). This enables us to have a lot of different scripts which we can send out automatically on a daily/weekly/monthly basis.

[tookei]

The story is that users are experts in asking just that report which is not available

It seems that our users share the same skill

I did a lot of daily EXCEL, users were happy to compute their KPI on it.
But I were not fully satisfied, because the data was consumed only day by day, and it required big effort to setup history dashboards.
By the way, when the database became bigger and bigger, I could not use PHPExcel because the server didn't have enough memory.

Back to my business, when a first version will be online, I would be happy to get your feedback

[cas]

Look forward to test your plugin Tookei, just keep us in the loop

[jolyon.tidmarsh]

I'm really interested in this sort of reporting. We use mantis for general project management much more than software projects. I'm happy to provide mock-ups of the sort of thing we're interested in. feel free to get in touch.

[tookei]

I'm really interested in this sort of reporting. We use mantis for general project management much more than software projects. I'm happy to provide mock-ups of the sort of thing we're interested in. feel free to get in touch.

Hi jolyon.tidmarsh,
I have set up many Mantis to manage everything else than the original use case, so I can easily imagine what you could do on your side
Concerning your mock-ups, it sounds interesting for us to benchmark our ideas, so feel free to contact me by pm.