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Identify Blocked Pipelines dashboard

The Identify Blocked Pipelines dashboard enables you to identify and prevent issues blocking your value stream pipelines, such as deployment, CI/CD, peer reviews, and so on. Identifying these blockers early in the cycle and addressing them can provide for an efficient development process with quicker and quality releases.

Using this dashboard, Engineering Managers can look into their projects and analyze the time taken to address failed deployments and builds, and re-trigger them to achieve success. You can understand blocked executions that are affecting committed work and have a plan to resolve these blockers, thereby minimizing downstream delays.

As a business stakeholder, you can find answers to some of the key business scenarios such as:

• Identify areas within the development pipeline that cause the most quality issues.
• Identify hot spots and root causes for quality issues and understand its impact on the release.
• How frequently is functioning code being delivered to QA, Staging, Production environments?
• Is the build quality getting better or worse in every iteration across the release?

The Identify Blocked Pipelines dashboard displays data in the following chapters with each chapter focusing on blockers in specific development pipelines:

• Overview
• Deployment Pipeline
• Build Pipeline
• Blocked Execution
• Pull Request

You can use the filter in the dashboard to analyze information related to specific Engineering Managers (up to three levels by default).

Overview

The Overview chapter provides insights into the overall projection of Deployment mean time to restore, build mean time to restore, time taken to successfully execute blocked test cases, total duration between last commit date and the completed date of the pull request, and sum of total time taken to restore failed deployments, to restore failed builds, to successfully execute blocked test cases, and pull request wait time.

The KPI displayed on the tab is the overall delay across Deployment Pipeline, Build Pipeline, Blocked Execution, and Pull Request pipeline.

The Overview chapter has the following distinct panels:

• Recommendations: This panel gives recommendations on top three Projects where there is an opportunity to reduce total delay.
• Delay Projection: Displays a grid with information about projects or engineering managers. It provides insights on Deployment mean time to restore, build mean time to restore, time taken to successfully execute blocked test cases, total duration between last commit date and the completed date of the pull request, and sum of total time taken to restore failed deployments, to restore failed builds, to successfully execute blocked test cases, and pull request wait time.

  This grid also provides the Opportunity Rank for each project that helps in prioritizing projects that have the most amount of time spent on resolving blockers in deployment, build, test case execution and pull request pipelines. The rank is calculated based on the rank of total delays caused by deployment restore time, build restore time, blocked execution, and pull request wait time, in descending order. A lower rank value signifies scope in improvement.

• Impact of Delay On Flow: Displays a bubble chart that provides information about the sum of total time taken to restore failed deployments, to restore failed builds, to successfully execute blocked test cases, and pull request wait time, and velocity of completed work items. Each bubble represents a Project, and the tool tip provides details about the delays and velocity for each project.
• Time Spent: This panel displays a stacked bar graph that provide information related to the delays caused due to issues across pipelines and actual time spent on completed work items.

Deployment Pipeline

The Deployment Pipeline chapter provides insights into issues faced as part of the deployment process, such as time to restore failed deployments, deployment trend over a period, impact of deployments, and highlights opportunities that you can leverage to improve the overall deployment pipeline.

The data displayed in this chapter pertains to Projects that have at least one failed deployment in the last 180 days (including the current date).

The Deployment Pipeline chapter provides the following sections:

• KPI: The KPI displayed on the Deployment Pipeline tab indicates the total time taken to restore failed deployments in the last 180 days (including the current date).
• Recommendations: Displays recommendations to prioritize on improving time taken to restore failed deployments associated with the top 3 projects as determined using the Opportunity Rank.
• Deployment Time To Restore: Displays a grid with information about projects or engineering managers associated with failed deployments and displays information about the time taken to restore these failed deployments. You can view the restore time for the last 90 days and compare it with prior to last 90 days data. You can also view the percentage of improvement for restore time and the colors on the values signify best and worst values.
  • Green indicates 50% or more improvement in failed deployment restore time.
  • Amber indicates improvement between 0% and 50%
  • Red indicates less than 0% improvement.

    The above values are default configurations that are provided out-of-the-box and can be modified to suit your business needs.

  This grid also provides the Opportunity Rank for each project that helps in prioritizing projects that have the worst restore time for failed deployments. The rank is calculated based on the percentage improvement in restore times and a lower rank signifies scope for improvement.

  You can click a particular project or manager in the grid to drill down and view only relevant data in the subsequent panels.

• Deployment Impact: Displays a bubble chart that provides information about the impact, failed deployments have on the total restore time. Each bubble corresponds to a Project and the size indicates the time taken to restore failed deployments.
• Deployment Trend: Displays the trend of deployments across a period categorized based on the deployment status. You can hover over the bars to view the number of deployments, status, time period, and also understand the total deployment duration.
• Deployment Phase: Displays a heat map to denote time to restore failed deployments categorized by deployment phases. Each square in the heat map corresponds to a deployment phase and the size of the squares indicate the total time taken to restore deployments from failure to achieve success.

Build Pipeline

The Build Pipeline chapter provides insights into issues faced as part of your software build process, such as time to restore failed builds, identify opportunities to improve the build process, impact of failed builds, comparative study of successful and unsuccessful builds across a period, and get more details about specific builds.

The data displayed in this chapter pertains to Projects that have at least one failed build in the last 180 days (including the current date).

The Build Pipeline chapter provides the following sections:

• KPI: The KPI displayed on the Build Pipeline tab indicates the total time taken to restore failed builds in the last 180 days (including the current date).
• Recommendations: Displays recommendations to prioritize on improving time taken to restore failed builds associated with the top 3 projects as determined using the Opportunity Rank.
• Build Time To Restore: Displays a grid with information about projects or engineering managers associated with failed builds and displays information about the time taken to restore these failed builds. You can view the restore time for the last 90 days and compare it with prior to last 90 days data. You can also view the percentage of improvement for restore time and the colors on the values signify best and worst values.
  • Green indicates 50% or more improvement in failed build restore time.
  • Amber indicates improvement between 0% and 50%
  • Red indicates less than 0% improvement.

  The above values are default configurations that are provided out-of-the-box and can be modified to suit your business needs.

  This grid also provides the Opportunity Rank for each project that helps in prioritizing projects that have the worst restore time for failed builds. The rank is calculated based on the percentage improvement in restore times and a lower rank signifies scope for improvement.

  You can click a particular project or manager in the grid to drill down and view only relevant data in the subsequent panels.

• Build Impact: Displays a bubble chart that provides information about the impact, failed builds have on the total restore time. Each bubble corresponds to a Project and the size indicates the time taken to restore builds.
• Build Trend: Displays the trend of builds across a period categorized based on the build status. You can hover over the bars to view the build volume, build status, time period, and also understand the total time taken by builds.
• Build Details: Displays detailed information about builds, such as Build Definition, Build ID, Name, Status, and Build Duration.

Blocked Execution

The Blocked Execution is the sum of duration between execution of test cases that are blocked and consecutive successful execution linked to a test suite and this chapter provides insights to improve the execution of test cases, impact of execution of test cases, comparative study of successful and unsuccessful execution of test cases across a period.

The data displayed in this chapter pertains to Projects that have at least one failed test case in the last 180 days (including the current date).

The Blocked Execution chapter contains the following sections:

• KPI: The KPI displayed on the Blocked Execution tab indicates the total time taken for successful execution of blocked test cases in the last 180 days (including the current date).
• Recommendations: Displays recommendations to prioritize on improving total time taken for successful execution of blocked test cases associated with the top three projects as determined using the Opportunity Rank.
• Blocked execution: Displays a grid with information about projects or engineering managers associated with the time taken to execute blocked test cases. You can view the number of days taken for executing test cases in the last 90 days as compared to the prior to last 90 days data. You can also view the percentage of improvement for test case execution times and the colors on the values signify best and worst values.
  • Green indicates 50% or more improvement in test execution time.
  • Amber indicates improvement between 0% and 50%
  • Red indicates less than 0% improvement.
    

The above values are default configurations that are provided out-of-the-box and can be modified to suit your business needs.

This grid also provides the Opportunity Rank for each project that helps in prioritizing projects that have taken the most time to execute blocked test cases. The rank is calculated based on the percentage improvement of test execution time and a lower rank signifies scope for improvement.

You can click a particular project or manager in the grid to drill down and view only relevant data in the subsequent panels.

• Test execution Trend: Displays stacked bar charts to provide details about the trend of features tested against specified time buckets. The colors in the bars denote the status of test cases. You can hover over the bars to view the number of features tested, status, time period, and also number of blocked test cases.
• Requirement Analysis: This grid is a word cloud which displays keywords that are most often used in the descriptions of requirement Work Items that are associated with blocked test executions. This section considers only those work items that are linked to the test executions.

  Note: The panel must be enlarged to view the word cloud.

• Work Item Details: Displays detailed information about the test cases linked to the work item. It provides information whether the test case is passed, failed, skipped and so on.

Pull Request

The Pull Request Wait Time is the sum of duration between the date on which the last commit was done and the date on which the pull request was complete, and this chapter provides insights into pull request trend, delays of the pull requests, and commit details.

The Pull Request chapter contains the following sections:

• KPI: The KPI displayed on the Pull Request tab indicates the overall time (in days) lost waiting for a pull request after the last commit was done, across all projects. Only those Projects that have a pull request created in the last 180 days (including current date) are considered in this grid.
• Recommendations: Displays recommendations to prioritize on improving the pull request wait times for the top three projects as determined using the opportunity rank.
• Pull request Wait time: Displays a grid with information about projects or engineering managers associated with the pull request created within last 180 days. You can view the Pull Request wait time for the last 90 days and compare it with prior to last 90 days data. You can also view the percentage of improvement for wait time and the colors on the values signify best and worst values.
  • Green indicates 50% or more improvement in pull request wait time.
  • Amber indicates improvement between 0% and 50%
  • Red indicates less than 0% improvement.

  The above values are default configurations that are provided out-of-the-box and can be modified to suit your business needs.

  This grid also provides the Opportunity Rank for each project that helps in prioritizing projects that have the worst pull request wait time. The rank is calculated based on the percentage improvement Pull Request wait time and a lower rank signifies scope for improvement.

  You can click a particular project or manager in the grid to drill down and view only relevant data in the subsequent panels.

• Pull request Delays: Displays a bubble chart that provides information about the total number of pull requests which were created in the last 180 days, and has associated commits. Each bubble corresponds to a Project and the size indicates the number of commits committed on a given date. The position of the bubble along the y-axis indicates the total number of pull requests associated with the project.
• Pull request Trend: Displays stacked bar charts to provide details about the trend of pull requests against specified time buckets (based on the pull request created date). The colors in the bar denote the status of the pull request and you can hover over each section of the bar to view details about the number of commits associated with the pull requests.
• Commit Details: Displays detailed information about commits that are associated with pull requests of projects. You can view details such as the Commit ID, person who performed the commit, date of the commit, and Work Item ID associated with the commit.

  Note: Only commit's that are linked to a valid Work Item are displayed in this grid.

Metrics used in this dashboard