Drill down
Drill down is one of the features I’ve been considering implementing for a while. The natural curiosity that should arise with these charts is to dig down into the work items themselves, investigating further and having more informed conversations. Drill down is the feature that can help with that.
I decided to focus on doing this just for the main ‘dashboard’ page within FlowViz. I figured as this is the first page people see, and provides the most ‘holistic’ view, it’s best to have drill down there (although I may add it to other pages in future iterations). As a number of the visuals are grouped (in order to flip between normal/dark mode), the best way to drill down is to go into focus mode ‘image’ for each chart, right click then drill down:
Users then get further insights into that given week. For example in this case you get a better understanding as to how the percentage is calculated, as well as the individual items that have contributed towards that number in the selected week.
Currently, the drill down pages are only in ‘normal’ mode, even if you navigate to them via a dark mode page, something I will look to fix in future versions.
There is a handy navigation back to the main page for users, allowing them to easily get back to the homepage on their report.
Hyperlink to work items
Within the drill down page, details on each work item that has contributed towards that metric can be viewed by the user. As mentioned previously I wanted to help people dig deeper into conversations around the numbers, which you can only really do by going to the work itself. This likely means needing to go into the work items themselves, viewing the history, comments, acceptance criteria etc. For Azure DevOps users they can now do this, with the title column in the table having a hyperlink to the work item itself.
To do this I had to do a fair bit of work in Power Query using the parameters, however the current implementation means this won’t work for Azure DevOps Server/TFS users.
New Tooltips
As the drill down feature is now available, I wanted to make this clearer to users that this option was now there. Tooltips that are on the Dashboard page now have supporting text to make this clear to users the drill down is available and to access via focus mode.
Due to the fact that drill down is available for all the charts, I thought it best to add tooltips for the Quality and Responsiveness charts as well.
It provides greater insight into how the numbers are calculated, as well as encouraging users to go deeper in understanding what happened on a given week. Again the focus mode text highlights how users can go further into the insights.
Improved performance
The final update to mention are performance improvements to data queries. The WorkItems Blocked and WorkItems Daily Blocked Count have both had significant performance improvements, thanks to a user suggestion on GitHub. This should improve load time by ~75%, so I highly recommend this latest version for that alone. Less time waiting means more time to discuss the insights!
The queries previously relied on a date to start from that was hard coded into the query of being from 1st Feb 2020 or 1st Feb 2021. Over time this can grow and it also means needing to regularly create a new version to update the data. This now is coded to just pull in the last 6 or 18 months worth of data (depending on which table you’re querying).
Future features
I have a few ideas on features I’d like to do next, specifically:
Conditional tooltips
Conditional drill down
Dynamic data range in queries
Blockers page drill down
The latest version of FlowViz is available now.
If it provides value please add a review on the Marketplace and let me know in the comments below anything you’d like to see next!