Dashboard Topic: Quality Assurance Testing Dashboards
Executive Dashboard projects sometime tend towards the complex end of the design spectrum in terms of the numbers of features and bells/whistles in the user interface. It’s good to take a step back now and then to take a look at what users really need to see in their dashboards. I found this great pdf on a low tech QA testing dashboard that brings us back to basics in how a performance dashboard is used. It was presented as part of a keynote speech for a software testing conference.
Take a look at this simple qa dashboard:
It’s important to note that the performance dashboard shown above is meant to be drawn on a whiteboard and used in a room. The author sketches out the typical setup:
Here are some key points in using the QA testing dashboard:
The dashboard answers the following main questions:
What is the status of testing?
What are you doing today?
When will you be finished?
Why is it taking so long
Have you tested (insert specific item here) yet?
This dashboard is effective because:
Management has little patience for detailed test status reports
Management doesn’t understand testing
Read the pdf to see the particulars of using this simple dashboard. The low tech approach is startlingly simple and I think it an appropriate exercise to see how it would apply to your particular dashboarding problem.
Tags: Back to Basics Dashboard, QA Dashboard, Quality Assurance Testing Dashboard
This dashboard is concise and contains lots of useful information at the same time. I presume that the given format would also prove quite useful during the triage meetings conducted during test cycles.
Inder P Singh