Project health charts aggregate metrics from work items, source control, test results, and builds. They answer questions about the actual state of your project at many scales: for the days within an iteration, iterations within a project, or projects with in a program. The questions are also relevant for many kinds of work items such as scenarios, quality of service requirements, tasks, and bugs.
Bugs by Priority
Are the correct bugs being found and triaged? Bugs reported by priority assess the effectiveness of two things: bug hunting and triage. Discovering bugs is a normal part of product development. Often however, the easy-to-find bugs aren’t the ones that will annoy customers the most. If the high-priority bugs are not being found and a disproportionate number of low-priority bugs are, redirect the testing efforts to look for the bugs that matter. In triage, it is easy to over-prioritize bugs beyond the capacity to resolve them, or under-prioritize them to the point where customers are highly dissatisfied.
Velocity
How quickly is the team completing work? Velocity is one of the key elements for estimation. It shows how quickly the team is actually completing planned work, and how much the rate varies from day-to-day, or iteration-to-iteration. Use this data to plan the next iteration, in conjunction with the quality measures. Similar to the remaining work chart, this is most useful when looking at days within an iteration or iterations within a project.
Bug Rates
How effectively are bugs being found, fixed, and closed? Bug rates are best interpreted relative to all of the current team project activities and the other metrics on the Quality Indicators graph. For example, a high find-rate may be a sign of poorly written code, newly integrated code, or effective testing, or exceptional events such as a bug bash. On the other hand, a low find rate may mean high quality product or ineffective testing. Use code coverage, code churn, and test rates to help you assess the meaning.
Remaining Work
How much work is left to be done, and when will it be completed? This cumulative flow diagram shows work remaining measured as scenarios and quality of service requirements being resolved and closed in the iteration.
Actual Quality versus Planned Velocity
How many scenarios can be completed before quality is unacceptable? As much as teams believe the saying "haste makes waste" there is usually a business incentive to go faster. A project manager’s goal ought to be to balance the two by finding the maximum rate of progress that does not make quality suffer. This graph presents the relationship, for each iteration, of estimated size to overall quality.
Reactivations
How many work items are being reactivated? Reactivations are work items that have been resolved or closed prematurely. A low rate of work item reactivations (for example, less than 5%) might be acceptable, but a high or rising rate of reactivation should warn the project manger to diagnose the root cause and fix it.
Scenario List
Iteration Plan
Test Approach
