Daily Time Remain Trends report

When you use Time Tracking and your Developers report remain time on regular basis, it is important to track changes of remaining time daily and notice problematic work items timely. What may be a sign that an obstacle appeared:

• Time Remain + Time Spent (in actual hours) becomes greater than initially estimated Effort (in ideal hours)
• Time Remain is not decreasing day by day

Targetprocess tool has solutions helping to visualize these two types of sygnals.

Daily Progress board view has color highlighting for entities having total time spent and remain exceeding initial estimates. However it is not useful for tracking changes dynamically.

Visual report for Daily Time Remain Trends helps to see how Time Remain records are changing daily for your work items. In this article we'll describe how to create such report for your projects.

This dashboard serves as a partial replacement for the obsolete Daily Progress report from TP2 era, cancelled now:

Creating report step by step

In left menu, click + Create > Report.

In the header, rename the report to Daily Time Remain Trends.

Setup and filter data source

In Setup tab:

Select projects and teams data from which will be displayed on the report. We recommend to select just one project at this time.

Select Times as Data Sources

Apply a Filter to your data. If you have Iterations, apply this one:

?Assignable.Iteration is Current

Otherwise, we recommend to filter your data by dates range:

?Date >= Today-2(weeks)

Then press Create report button.

Setup axes

We'll convert the horizontal axis into timeline with daily resolution. In the list of available fields find Date field, drag it to horizontal axis and drop there.

By default, WEEK(Date) mode is set. Click the axis label and switch it to DAY(Date) mode.

Let's split horizontal charts by work items. Use Assignable field for this purpose. Field is missing in the initial list, but it is possible to add it there using Add field or formula button in the bottom.

The field appears in the list of available fields. Now it is possible to drag it and drop to the vertical axis.

Count of records field is added automatically to the same axis. We're not interested in it. Let's remove it using red X.

Instead, let's drag Remain field to the vertical axis.

Customize chart

If your users post time records under different roles, it is helpful to color code time records by role. Find Role field in the list of available fields, then drag it and drop to the Color control.

Switch the Chart type to Area chart.

Drag and drop Remain field to Label control for additional visibility. Numbers become shown on areas.

Press Finish setup button in the top right corner. Done! Here is how the ready report looks:

Access to chart

In the report settings (Set up report button > Access tab) you can select user from what projects and teams will be able to see this report in their left menu among other groups, views and dashboards.

Tracking multiple Projects and Iterations simultaneously

If you have several projects each having iteration in progress, it is also possible to handle this use case and track daily time remain trends per iteration. You may follow one of the two approaches:

• Create separate report per each project. Jump from report to report when needed, organize reports with groups in the left menu freely.
• Use single report, but change currently selected projects and teams using selector in the report settings (Set up report button > Setup tab) whenever needed.