397517 - Bugzilla Status Dashboard (dashbar, scoreboard)

Status: NEW

(Bugzilla :: User Interface, enhancement)

Description

[Kevin Benton]

Scot Weber is credited for the original idea.  I'm just filing a bug on it and expanding it a bit.

Many users of large Bugzilla installations get a lot of email from Bugzilla and would rather use in-Bugzilla methods of tracking things like # of active requests, # of bugs in each state assigned to the user, etc.  It would be extremely helpful if Bugzilla had an additional status line close to the top of the display showing users the following:

My Requests: 2 | My Bugs: REOPENED 1, UNCONFIRMED 14, NEW 2, ASSIGNED 7, RESOLVED 22, VERIFIED 113

Each of the displayed values would have associated hyperlinks with them to display the list of bugs, and to keep system load down, would store that data in a browser-based cookie, updating only once every (n) minutes as configured by the sysadmin or user.  The list of statuses that would appear in this dashboard would be both configurable at the system level as well as at the user level (since many users don't care about RESOLVED, VERIFIED, or CLOSED bugs for a dashboard).

"My Requests" would be a count of bugs that the user is specifically requested to change from ?.

This gives users a heads-up display of what they need to be aware of at any given moment.  This is especially important for sites where a review and approval process is implemented.

As I see it, to keep database hits down, a separate table would be required that tracks userid, status_type, and count.  That table would be updated any time a bug's flags, assignee, reporter, or QA contact changed, or the status of a bug changed.  This could easily be done through triggers, but we still support at least one database that doesn't do triggers yet (MySQL 4.1.x).  Therefore, it would need to be handled from the code side.

Comment 1

[Frédéric Buclin]

This information is already available using table reports. I have one myself to track such information.

Comment 2

[Kevin Benton]

(In reply to comment #1)
> This information is already available using table reports. I have one myself to
> track such information.
> 

Cool.  :-)

Now - the trick I see is getting it into the useful-links template so users are exposed to it all the time and don't have to go to that report.  In a business environment, this helps keep users aware of the status of bugs they're responsible for in some way (those that would show up in the my bugs report and my requests report).

Comment 3

[Kevin Benton]

Correction - if not in useful-links, then at least in index.html.tmpl

Comment 4

[Nochum Sossonko [:Natch]]

I don't necessarily agree with the exact solution proposed in this bug, however, I definitely think Bugzilla and its users would benefit tremendously from a (customizable) dashboard. Needs to be spec'ed out, but can definitely help.

The dash should be the home page (if desired) for users where they can add "widgets" with data like "333 bugs blocking" or "86 bugs unconfirmed and untouched since the turn of the century" etc. So much stuff gets lost in transit otherwise, IMHO...

In business software, the executives would generally see a "KPI" (Key Performance Indicators) dashboard as their home page, which gives them an overview of all the information contained in the software. From there, they can drill down to varying levels of specificity. This would be similar.

I wonder what others would think of this.

Comment 5

[Frédéric Buclin]

Bugzilla 4.0 is closed for enhancement requests. We are close to 4.0rc1.

Comment 6

[Guy Pyrzak]

Sorry Natch, but this would require a HUGE amount of work and getting that into our almost stable 4.0 release would basically be impossible. However, I plan on working on bug 130835 for the 4.2 release, which might eventually lead to an easy way to build this sort of feature. I'm guessing that even if we did develop this sort of feature it would be as an extension and not as a core part of Bugzilla since there are whole tools dedicated to building dashboards. I'd prefer to see Bugzilla implement the API's required by other dashboard tools that have compatible architectures. 

Does anyone know of some good dashboard tools that are popular?

Comment 7

[Nochum Sossonko [:Natch]]

(In reply to comment #5)
> Bugzilla 4.0 is closed for enhancement requests. We are close to 4.0rc1.

I apologize, I thought 4.0 was far off. I guess I meant to nominate for .next-major-release...

Comment 8

[Max Kanat-Alexander]

See also bug 130835.