Tabular Report with totals for Effort and Time Spent

Sometimes you may not need a very detailed Custom Report by Time. Instead, you would like to get a Report showing you filtered and aggregated totals per User Story, Feature, Iteration, Release, Team Iteration or even Project or Team. Summary Columns is the feature that may help you to extract the required data from the Targetprocess system.

To illustrate this, let’s build a report displaying total Time Spent and Time Spent by members of a specific team for all User Stories in finished Iterations only. For each Iteration, we will also include estimated Velocity (from Iteration details page) and Actual Velocity (i.e. a sum of Effort Completed across assigned User Stories and Tasks) columns.

A sum of Effort Completed gives an actual velocity (measured in Ideal Hours or Points planning units) reached in the Iteration, while a Time Spent sum shows the amount of actual hours spent.

Here is how this Custom Report can be built:

1. Click the Create new custom report link.
2. In the Entity tab, choose a Process for your report. Use the one that your Project is based on (see here how to locate it). All Processes option is good unless you require to get a Custom Fields data (Custom Fields are process-specific).
3. Choose Iteration as a top level entity for the report.

4. In the Columns tab, choose the columns with Iteration data you need for the top level report. Name, Start Date, End Date, Velocity, Release → Name, Project → Name or Abbreviation could possibly fit best.
5. In the Filters tab, add some criteria to narrow down your search if needed. You may probably want to filter by Start / End Date, Is Current, Release or Project attributes. Custom Reports are independent from the Teams / Projects context currently selected so Project → ID, Name, Abbreviation are most useful to specify what Project your report is created for. In our example we will filter out finished Iterations only, using the following Filter: End Date / less than / Today.

6. In the Summary Columns tab we will add several columns that are important for this report. Use the Add Column button for each column. A Summary Column value is calculated using the collection of entities that belong to the given top level entity. Here are the suggested column names and settings:

• Total Time Spent. Collection : User Stories. Field : Time Spent. Function : sum.
• Time Spent by CAT Team. Collection : User Stories. Field : Time Spent. Function : sum. Filters… : Team:Name / equal to / CAT.
• Actual Velocity: Collection : User Stories. Field : Effort Completed. Function : sum.

7. In the Inner Lists tab you may want to add an Inner list describing User Stories from the given Iterations. In this case you should first create and save a report for the User Story entity. You can simply skip this step for now.
8. In the Settings tab, type the name for your new Custom Report and specify Page sizing.
9. Press Save & Run Report.

You will get a spreadsheet with Iteration details. By clicking on column headers it is possible to sort records in ascending or descending order, and group them by values in the selected columns, e.g. by Release. Grouping is useful because totals are calculated at the bottom of each group.

Now you can print your report or export it to MS Excel. The report will appear in Reports → Other Reports → Custom Reports → Saved Reports list if you have saved it. Every Targetprocess user is able to run this report if it has been made Public in the Settings tab.

Adding a Summary Column for Time Spent and Effort Completed on Bugs is pretty similar but you should use the Bugs collection in this case.

It is not recommended to use the Assignables collection for Summary Columns because of possible data duplication in calculations. Both User Stories and Tasks are Assignables. The Effort Completed and Time Spent fields for a User Story already contain those for child Tasks related to these User Stories.

In this example the report is created for Iterations, but you can create one for Team Iterations, Releases or Projects in the same way.

Once you have created the report for Iterations, you can use it as an Inner List for a Release report.

Now you can print your report or export it to MS Excel.

It is also possible to build custom graphical report serving the same purpose. Contact our Support team for assistance.