This past Saturday, we released a new Defect Trend chart. It’s similar to the Release Defect Trend chart as well as the Arrival and Kill in-product visualization except that you have a lot more control. We also upgraded the Defects by State and Defects by Priority charts to be similarly more flexible.

Defect Trend Settings PanelTo access the new flexibility, you need to place the charts on the dashboard. As seen in the screenshot of this dashboard settings panel, you can:

  • specify the date range including Granularity (Days, Weeks, Months, Quarters), and how far back to display;
  • filter by Priorities and Severities;
  • for the two Defects by… reports, you can specify what states to display; and
  • the Defect Trend report allows you to specify which states are to be considered “Terminal” (closed or otherwise resolved) as opposed to “Active” (as yet unresolved). This allows you to count “Could not duplicate” or “Deferred” in the same series as “Closed”.

These features benefit folks using both Kanban as well as anyone using Scrum or some other process but that want to explore their data in ways not allowed by the existing visualizations. It allows you to establish your own feedback cadence on the quality of your product/process. That flexibility plus the filtering also allows you to answer questions of your own devising about how well you are doing with respect to quality:

  • Are we injecting more or fewer defects?
  • Are we resolving defects as fast as they are being found?
  • In what time frame did it change direction?
  • Is it all defects or just P1s and P2s that are getting worse?

Defect Trend Annotated

I recorded a demo video of an exploratory data analysis session using the new/updated defect charts. It shows you how to use the various features of the charts to discern patterns that your team can leverage to enable discussion and make better decisions. The best way to view it in full 720p is by using this Screencast-o-matic link. It requires java but it’s higher resolution and it’s broken up into sections so you can navigate to the parts you want to see. If you don’t have java, you can stream a lower resolution version from YouTube.

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