This article is obsolete for On-demand accounts. Please see our guide section on how to create Visual Reports.
You can create thousands of charts, there is no limitations. But you should know something to be fluent in charts creation:
- Entities properties. For example, you should know that a User Story has the CreateDate and the Effort properties.
- Aggregation functions
- How report types and axis work
Quick Links
Aggregation and grouping functions
Few numeric values on one Axis
Requires Targetprocess 3.6.0+
Entities properties
There are quite many entities with various properties. Full reference is here.
For your convenience, here is the list of the most interesting properties for User Story entity:
Property | Description |
---|---|
Name | Name of User Story |
StartDate | When User Story is moved from Open or Planned state to any “in progress” state |
EndDate | When User Story is moved into Done state |
Effort | User Story estimated effort (in hours or points) |
Progress | Calculated progress in % |
TimeSpent | How many hours were spent on User Story |
TimeRemain | How many hours remain to complete User Story |
LeadTime | Days between User Story completion and creation |
CycleTime | Days between User Story completion and start (EndDate-StartDate) |
Project | Related Project, you can group User Stories by Project |
Release | Related Release |
Iteration | Related Iteration |
Team | Team assigned to User Story |
Feature | Related Feature |
COUNT | Number of User Stories |
AssignedUser | not supported so far |
The User Story entity has some collections that you can use on axis as well. For example, you may want to see how many bugs every user story has, in this case you will set up axes like:
Y: Bugs.COUNT
X: Name
So, User Story has interesting collections like:
Tasks
Bugs
TestCases
Times
Aggregation and grouping functions
There are two types of aggregations: for dates and for numbers.
Aggregation for dates allows to group information by days, weeks, months, quarters and years:
DAY(EndDate)
WEEK(EndDate)
MONTH(EndDate)
QUARTER(EndDate)
YEAR(EndDate)
Aggregation for numbers allows to calculate various functions:
AVG(Effort)
SUM(Effort)
MAX(Effort)
MIN(Effort)
COUNT()
Aggregated functions can be applied to numeric properties. If you want to apply them to collections, it is also possible. For example, User Story has Bugs collection and you can create dimensions like:
Bugs.SUM(Effort)
Bugs.AVG(Effort)
Reports Types and Axes
Targetprocess supports three types of reports: Line, Bar and Scatterplot and 6 axis X -> X, Y -> Y ( (you can have nested X and Y axes, read more in Facets section), COLOR and SIZE. COLOR and SIZE axes behavior slightly changes in different chart types:
Chart Type | COLOR | SIZE |
---|---|---|
Line | draws several lines with different colors | not supported |
Bar | draws several bars with different colors | not supported |
Scatterplot | draws circles with different colors | draws circles with different area |
Color specifics
Quite often you want to color charts based on entity types. For example, a line for Bugs should be red, a line for User Stories should be blue. In this case you can use entityType.name in COLOR axis.
Without COLOR you will have aggregated average for both Bugs and User Stories. When you set COLOR equals to entity type, then a chart will draw a separate line for every entity type:
You can use COLOR for other properties as well. For example, if you specify Team.name in COLOR axis, it will color every team with some random color.
So far you can’t define exact color, like pink, Targetprocess selects colors itself.
Line
To create a simple line chart, just specify X and Y axes and select Line chart option. Let’s create a chart that shows how many bugs were closed every week:
Chart creation step by step:
- We want to see bugs trend, so select Bug entity.
- We want to see bugs for the last 6 months, so filter them out with the following filter:
?EndDate >= Today - 180(days)
- Axes mapping:
a. X axis shows bugs EndDate grouped by week: WEEK(EndDate)
b. Y axis shows bugs count: Count()
c. COLOR shows entity type (otherwise the line will not be red): entityType.name - Select line chart
- Click Apply changes button to create a report
NOTE: if you want to draw several lines on a single chart, you should set COLOR axis. For example, if you want to draw separate lines for bugs in every project, set COLOR project.name. In this case chart will set some random color to every lane.
Line chart doesn’t support SIZE axis so far. Only Scatterplot uses SIZE to draw circles of different areas.
Bar
The bar chart is quite similar to the line chart. To create it select the “Bar” button:
You can also differentiate entity types by colors. Just put the “EntityType” parameter into the “Color” field.
It's possible to create stacked bar charts in Targetprocess where values are shown on top of one another to see the cumulative effect.
To do this select the ‘Stack’ option chart type from the setup area.
Note that the SIZE axis is not supported by Bar Charts.
Scatterplot
This chart is good to reveal correlations. Every dot is a separate entity. Size can be used to encode bubble size. For example, you may see correlation between number of Bugs in User Stories and Time spent on User Stories. Here is how we setup the chart:
As a result, we can see something similar to this:
It seems there is slight correlation between time spent and number of bugs in user stories.
Facets
Every report can have two Y, two X or YYXX axis, in this case we call this report faceted. Basically, it splits a chart and draws it for every variable as a facet. For example, you can create a chart that shows average cycle time for User Stories and Bugs. Then you can create facets for Projects and then for Teams:
To create a facet, you should specify Y twice. For example, to create facets by Projects:
In this case Projects will be rows:
Now we want to group by Teams as well. To create facets on both axes, we should set up the chart as shown in the picture below
As a result, we will see cycle time for every Project and every Team.
What can we say about the above chart? It is clear that Team 2 had some problems with cycle time in Project 2. Interestingly, at the same time it had no issues in Project 1. Also Team 1 is having problems with User Stories in Project 1 now (cycle time jumps). Also we can say that Teams 1 and 2 quite actively work on both projects.
Few numeric values on one Axis
It’s possible to see a few numeric values on one Axis. For example, you want to see the average, max and min cycle time.
As a result, you can see average, max and min cycle time values on one graph grouped by project.
Custom Fields
You can use Custom Fields the same way as other properties. The following custom field types are supported: Drop Down List, Checkbox, Date, Number. For example, we have Browser drop down custom field for the Bug entity. Here we collect information about browser-specific bugs. You may want to know in what browser the product is more buggy? Let's create a report to answer this question:
We used the Browser custom field as X. And the chart unsurprisingly shows that most bugs were related to the Internet Explorer.
You may wonder if it is possible to group all bars related to IE into a single bar? In fact it is possible with a magical IIF operator. You should replace X Browser axis and type:
IIF(Browser.StartsWith("IE")||Browser=="Internet Explorer", "IE", Browser)
NOTE. Some custom fields have spaces in names, like “Total Budget”. In this case you should type these fields without spaces, like TotalBudget.
Exclude Data Points
Quite often you want to exclude some data points from a report. For example, report below, above that shows Bugs by Browser, doesn’t look very informative
This data point will be excluded and all other categories will be more visible
NOTE: When you refresh a report, excluded points will be visible again.
Trend Lines
Trend lines are useful in two cases:
1. They show trends on time based line charts.
It is almost always interesting to know the general trend of a variable. For example, here we want to see how average cycle time changes over time for two projects. Trend line helps us to clearly see that there are no changes for User Stories cycle time in project TP3, while it is improving for project QA Area.
2. They show correlations on scatterplot charts.
Scatterplot charts are good for correlations analysis. Trend line is a good tool to spot correlations immediately. In the example below we see that there is a correlation between number of Bugs in User Story and spent time on User Story. Most likely we can assume that User Stories with more Bugs take more time to implement.
Still have a question?
We're here to help! Just contact our friendly support team