This is a list of Frequently Asked Questions about the Process Dashboard
The dashboard actually contains a very small HTTP server that provides all the web content and thus the content cannot be displayed when the dashboard is not running. If you get an error message like "The page cannot be displayed - cannot find server," check to make certain that the dashboard is running.
If the dashboard is running, and you have never been able to view a script/form/chart/report, it may be that you need to adjust your proxy settings. Many people work at companies where they do not have a direct connection to the internet, but instead must connect to the web via an HTTP proxy server. If this describes you, you may need to tell your browser to bypass the proxy for the address "localhost". The instructions below may not apply to your browser word-for-word, but should hopefully get you pointed in the right direction:
The dashboard uses web browsers in unique and innovative ways. Unfortunately, some browsers aren't up to the task. If you can see the HTML forms but they don't seem to be talking to the Dashboard, then it is likely that your browser (or the Java environment within your browser) is encountering problems.
Your first step should be to ensure that you are using one of the browsers recommended for use with the dashboard. (See the installation help topic for more information.)
If you are using one of the approved browsers and you still have this problem, please send us an email at processdash-devel@lists.sourceforge.net and we will attempt to help you with the problem.
(These instructions apply to Windows.)
"C:\Program Files\JavaSoft\JRE\1.7\bin\java" -jar "C:\Program Files\Process Dashboard\pspdash.jar"
In most cases, when you create a team dashboard or personal dashboard, it
will automatically be configured with a flag indicating the dataset type.
However, if you have an older Team Dashboard that contains a mixture of team
projects and accidentally created personal projects, the dashboard may not be
able to infer the correct dataset type, and it may display the "toolbar" user
interface that is designed to help individuals collect data. If this occurs,
you can fix the problem by choosing "
→ Tools → Preferences → Advanced" and setting the
"datasetMode" parameter to "team".
You can have as many scripts and forms open as you like! The behavior you are seeing is a Microsoft "feature" designed to reduce clutter on your screen. Fortunately, you can alter that behavior. The instructions below may not apply to your browser word-for-word, but should hopefully get you pointed in the right direction:
The forms always display "live" data - this allows them to auto-recalculate numbers (like a spreadsheet does) when you edit data. It also allows changes made in one browser window to appear immediately in other browser windows. To make all this happen, the browser maintains an open connection to the dashboard, and passes data back and forth across this connection.
If you are viewing a form, and you close the main dashboard window, this open connection is closed as well. When this occurs, the form immediately displays "NO CONNECTION" to let you know that your changes are no longer making it back to the dashboard's data repository. To fix the problem, you must
If you have just opened a page containing a lot of data, the dashboard may need time to perform the calculations. It will display "CALCULATING" while the data is prepared to let you know that the form is not ready yet.
#VALUE!
" or "#DIV/0!
". What is wrong?
"#VALUE!
" indicates that the dashboard cannot calculate a
value because the formula references a value that is missing (displayed as
"?????
") or otherwise invalid (for example, a value like
"foo
" when a number was expected). When you see
"#VALUE!
" in a dashboard form, it almost always means
that there is a "?????
" field somewhere that you still need to
fill in. If you fill in all the "?????
" fields and the
"#VALUE!
" field does not recalculate, check to ensure that the
calculation is not frozen.
"#DIV/0!
" indicates that the dashboard encounted a
divide-by-zero error when calculating a particular data value. Many times
this is due to having a very small number of usable data points recorded by
the dashboard. For instance, if you start the dashboard for the first time
and try to look at Process Summary forms for a PSP2.1 process, the "% To
Date" fields will be filled with "#DIV/0!
". This is because the
total amount of time recorded in the tool is 0. The percentage calculation
attempts to divide by zero and returns the error.
Another problem can contribute to this condition as well. If you are not in the habit of clicking the little "completion" checkbox at the right end of the dashboard, some (or all) of your data will be ignored by the dashboard when creating reports and graphs. The reporting features of the dashboard only report tasks/projects that are marked as complete. See the Using the Completion Checkbox help topic for more information.
For the "Export to Excel" functionality to work seamlessly, you must have the ".IQY" file type properly set up on your system. This setup is normally performed by Microsoft Office during the installation process for Excel (although, notably, certain releases of Office 97 do not perform this setup).
If the IQY file type is not properly set up, clicking the "Export to Excel" links may instead cause Notepad to appear with a short, three-line text file. Alternatively, that three line text file might appear in an Excel spreadsheet.
If you encounter such problems, the simplest fix is to add the following setting to the "Advanced" section of the preferences editor:
excel.exportMethod=mime
And data will be exported to Excel statically.
The HTML forms used by the dashboard are continually "live". There is no need to press a submit button to send your data to the dashboard. Simply enter your data where necessary, and the dashboard will record it. However, after editing a data field, it is usually necessary to leave that field for your changes to take effect. You can press the TAB button or click somewhere else on the page. If the data you are changing is related to other data items on the page, you should see the other data elements update. For more information, see the Entering process data help topic.
When the timer is running and you first navigate to an activity, the dashboard will not create an entry in the time log until you have spent a full minute there; this is by design. For a more detailed explanation, see the help topic for the play / pause button.
Also, the dashboard will make a quiet "tick" sound whenever the timer starts and when a new project or project phase is chosen by the hierarchy menus when the timer is running. If you do not hear this sound, check the state of the play/pause button. The current state of the timer can always be determined by positioning the mouse pointer over the play/pause button. A tooltip help will pop up containing the current state.
The dashboard will "freeze" your planning data once you have completed the planning phase by clicking the completion checkbox. Also it will freeze all the data when the project is marked as complete. You can make these numbers editable by marking either the project or the planning phase incomplete again. For more info on freezing data see the data freezing and the completion checkbox help topics.
In his book A Self-Improvement Process for Software Engineers where he outlines the Personal Software Process, Watts Humphrey introduces the various process elements for doing PSP work in a graduated manner. Each PSP process is built upon the previous one. As a way of showing which process elements were added to the previous process definition, the forms in the book highlight the new process elements in bold italics. These highlighted elements return to normal text at the next process level. In our attempt to make our online forms as identical to the PSP forms as possible, we have included that detail.
However, the Process Dashboard makes certain steps on the scripts and forms unnecessary (e.g. instructions to sum up various data items -- the dashboard sums them for you). These unnecessary process steps are displayed as greyed-out text.
Also, there are places where the dashboard slightly changes the way certain steps are performed (e.g. instead of performing a PROBE calculation, the PROBE tool should be used). Green text is used to indicate this slight departure from the true PSP scripts and forms.
When you first begin using the dashboard, you have no historical data. As a result, previous versions of the dashboard would display "#DIV/0!" in the "Plan" column of your first project if it was based upon anything other than a PSP0 process.
Beginning with version 1.6.2, the dashboard will detect that you have no historical data, and introduce an example dataset based upon industry data and best practices. The dashboard uses this dataset to calculate the plan for your first PSP project.
As soon as you complete at least one PSP project, this example dataset will disappear. In the meantime, it may appear in various dashboard charts and reports.
For maximum portability, the document templates provided with the dashboard are rich text files (.rtf). Some browsers don't know what to do with a rich text file, and so they prompt you to save it (not very helpful). To solve this problem, you must:
Yes you can! Please see the section on overwriting process scripts in the help topic that describes how the dashboard finds the script files.
The dashboard stores all of your data in a single directory, in plain text files. This directory is often referred to in this documentation as the "data directory".
You can find out the exact location of your data directory by
choosing "Help About Process
Dashboard" from the configuration menu, then clicking on the
Configuration tab.
With the current default configuration, data is always stored in the "current working directory" when the dashboard is run.
On Windows systems, the "current working directory" is set by the icon you use to run the dashboard. Right-click on that icon and choose "Properties"
On Mac OS X systems, the data directory is set by the Application icon you use to run the dashboard. Ctrl-click on that icon, and choose "Show Package Contents." Then find the file "Resources/dataLocation.txt". You can edit this file to change the location where your data is stored.
On Unix/Linix systems, the current working directory is controlled by the shell script or icon you use to launch the dashboard. See this FAQ question below for more information.
It is possible to have multiple, independent data directories all on the same machine; just make copies of the icon you use to start the dashboard, and configure each icon with a different data location.
If you want to backup your psp data, simply back up the contents of your data directory. To move your psp data to a different computer,
If you did not continue running the dashboard when the dialog warned you that doing so could be quite dangerous, then yes, you probably can.
If you see this message, realize that the dashboard is being overly cautious with your data. As long as you didn't plow on ahead and run the dashboard with the questionable files in place, no data has been lost yet. The best steps to take next are:
Even though the Dashboard has been designed to be safe with your precious process data, it is still a good idea to back up the Dashboard's data directory every so often. See the question about backing up your Dashboard data for more information.
When you start the dashboard (whether on Linux, Windows, or any other operating system), it uses the "current working directory" for data storage.
On Windows, the installer program automatically creates a shortcut for the user which launches the dashboard with the appropriate current working directory, as selected during the installation process.
Unfortunately, the installer is not able to create shortcuts on all Linux/Unix platforms yet, so it may up to you to create an appropriate launcher manually. The dashboard does its best to help you out, by creating a shell script in your chosen data directory called "run-dash.sh". Take a look at the contents of that shell script. Embedded comments in that file include some helpful information; for example, If java and/or firefox are not in your path, you may need to edit a particular line of the script. With those edits, you should be able to use the script to launch the dashboard.
If you have already started using the dashboard and you've already created projects in your hierarchy that you want to keep, you can move them by carefully following the steps below:
global.dat time.log .pspdash ###.dat timelog.xml pspdash.ini ###.def timelog2.xml state
Unfortunately, No. We have this as a feature request.
In the meantime, the Cut and Paste features in the hierarchy browser will allow you to move your completed projects away from the part of the hierarchy where you are doing your active development. You could create a node at the top of the project hierarchy called "Archived Projects" and Cut and Paste your finished projects as children under it. They would still count towards your PROBE Estimates and your Planning data. See the hierarchy editor help topic for more information.
There are basically two concerns when in this kind of situation.
The most important time to identify a project as an outlier is during PROBE-style linear regression. This is easy to do; when using the PROBE tool, you can click on the "Chart" button to visually identify outliers, and the "Filter" button to remove any outliers from the regression calculation. The PROBE Wizard will also let you remove various data pairings from the regression calculation, but it won't show you a graph and thus isn't as intuitive. See the PROBE Tool and PROBE Wizard help topics for more information.
To remove a project's effects from Planning and To Date calculations, you can make use of multiple data sets. By defining a customized data set for your current project, you can isolate only the data you know is applicable. See the multiple To Date data help topic for more information.
A less desireable but simpler way to remove a project's effects would be to mark the project as incomplete. The To Date, Planning, and PROBE calculations only use completed projects for their data sets. The drawback with this approach is that you will lose the accurate completion date for the project that you mark incomplete.
A good question! The short answer: the web server built into the dashboard is NOT susceptible to any existing worms or viruses, and the default dashboard settings make it impossible for other computers to connect to your dashboard.
The longer answer: the web handling logic in the dashboard is based on Jetty, a widely-used and thoroughly reviewed open-source web server. The broad user base and continual review process help to make Jetty very secure.
Fortunately, because the dashboard is written in Java rather than C/C++, it is not susceptible to many common hacking techniques like buffer overruns (a common worm infection strategy). This means that even if a hacker was interested in writing an attack targeted at the dashboard, the worst thing they could probably do is to crash your running dashboard program.
If this information doesn't allay your concerns, you can use the "http.allowRemote" setting to ensure that it is impossible for other computers to connect to the dashboard (this is the default). See the advanced settings help topic for more information.
Like many modern software programs, the dashboard provides an "update notification" feature. Once a month, this feature checks to see if an updated version of the dashboard is available. If you have installed add-on process sets, it also checks to see if updated versions of these are available.
If new versions are available, the dashboard will display an alert, listing the items which have been updated. This alert has a checkbox which reads "Don't perform a monthly check for new releases." If you check this box, the dashboard will never perform this check again. You can also disable this check manually by unmarking the appropriate box in the preferences editor.
In the normal case, this "update check" will succeed, and the dashboard will make a note not to check for another 30 days. However, the update check might fail if no network is available (for example, because you are running the dashboard on a laptop that isn't connected to the network). As a result, if the update check fails for any reason, the update checking logic will try again the next time you start the dashboard.
If you see the dashboard attempt to check every time it starts up, this means that the update check is never completing successfully. This could occur if your personal firewall is blocking the connection, or if you are behind a password-protected corporate firewall. In either case, you can turn off this feature entirely as described above.
The DCR and SCR processes were shipped with version 1.1 of the Process Dashboard. They were later removed from the main dashboard and distributed as add-on process sets. As of version 1.4.1, they are no longer available.
Explicit written permission from Addison-Wesley is required to modify PSP scripts or distribute modified PSP scripts. Since the DCR/SCR process scripts were derived from the copyrighted PSP process scripts in A Discipline for Software Engineering, they fall into this category. We have not attempted to obtain that permission from Addison-Wesley, so these processes are no longer available.
As of Process Dashboard 2.5, a Visual Studio plugin is available that makes it easy to collect metrics without leaving your IDE. Contact the development team if you are interested in using this functionality.
If you are interested in developing integration for another IDE, take a look at the various REST APIs that the dashboard publishes. Your plugin can interact with those APIs to retrieve and modify UI state.
For much simpler mashups (such as quick links in a webpage), a handful of older APIs are still available. For example, if you issue an HTTP request of the form:
http://localhost:2468/control/startTiming.classthe dashboard timer will start. Similarly, an HTTP request of the form:
http://localhost:2468/control/stopTiming.classwill pause the timer. And
http://localhost:2468/Non+Project/foo//control/setPath.classwill change the current hierarchy path to "/Non Project/foo". If you want to change the current hierarchy path and start the timer, use
...//control/setPath.class?start
To open the defect dialog and log a new defect against the active task (the same action as clicking the defect button), use
http://localhost:2468/control/showDefectDialogTo open the defect dialog and edit an existing defect, use
http://localhost:2468/Project/Foo/Some+task//control/showDefectDialog?id=42where "/Project/Foo/Some+task" is the URL-encoded project/path that the defect was logged against, and "42" is the ID of the existing defect. (These values can be seen in the Defect Log Editor.)
Note: these commands will have no effect unless the HTTP request originates from the same machine where the dashboard is running.
Yes, the dashboard does contain powerful features that make it possible to roll up individual data to the team level. See the Team Use help topic for more information.
The latest developments in the development of the Process Dashboard, including the latest version, can be found at http://www.processdash.com
If you like, you can fill out a bug form on our web site at
http://www.processdash.com/bugTracker. The
simplest way to do this is just to pick "Help → Submit bug report"
from the dashboard's
menu. This will open your web browser pointed right to the bug form.
If you would rather send us an email, write to processdash-devel@lists.sourceforge.net