Project Dashboards: A Comprehensive User Guide

The ACCELQ Project Dashboard feature offers a holistic view of project metrics, including

• Real-time visibility into execution outcomes (manual and automation).

• Tracking of user activities (create, update, and delete on assets).

• Insights into test assets (scenarios, test cases, modules, and more).

• Quality attributes of test assets (stability, flakiness, and average execution time).

Dashboards aggregate data from across the project, letting you visualize and analyze both current trends and historical information. The system is highly configurable, making it possible to tailor exactly what you see, how you group the data, and how it’s presented visually.

Access and Permissions

Currently, ACCELQ supports a single, project-level dashboard that is visible to all users of that project. 

• Global Visibility: The existing dashboard is project-wide. Any updates to widgets are visible to every user in that project.

• License Considerations: Dashboards involving automation data require the tenant to have an Automation license. Likewise, for Manual subscription if you want to see metrics specific to manual testing. If a tenant has both, you can analyze both test types side by side.

Dashboard Overview

The Dashboard is designed to offer actionable insights into the test lifecycle. It enables you to visualize and monitor your data through customizable widgets, which can be tailored to track specific metrics and key performance indicators. You can access the Dashboard by clicking the Dashboard tab in the left navigation panel. Once inside, you’ll find an interactive space where widgets provide real-time data visualizations and reports.

What is a Widget?

Widgets are the building blocks of the ACCELQ Dashboard. Each widget provides a snapshot of specific aspects of your project, such as test execution status, user activity, or asset progress. Widgets can be customized with filters, grouping options, and chart types to fit your needs.

Widgets empower users to:

• Monitor Project Metrics: Track progress and identify bottlenecks.
• Visualize Data Effectively: Use charts and tables to analyze data trends.
• Interact with the Layout: Reorder and resize widgets to create a dashboard that suits your workflow.

For instance, you could create a widget that displays the history of test executions in the past 30 days, enabling you to quickly assess the quality of your test suite.

Analytics Parameters

Beyond recording what happened in each run, ACCELQ continuously calculates quality attributes for your Scenarios and Test Cases. These let you build widgets that answer questions about the health of your suite itself, rather than the outcome of a particular execution.

Three attributes are available:

Each is computed from the last 90 days of execution history and kept up to date on an ongoing basis.

To make these usable as widget fields, each value is classified into High, Medium, or Low bands. You work with the bands when filtering and grouping; the underlying values remain visible in the report view.

Both manual and automation results contribute to these calculations.

Note: Average execution time for manual tests reflects the elapsed time recorded during execution, which depends on how the tester worked through the run. Pauses and variations in pace are included, so treat manual execution times as indicative rather than precise.

Configuring the bands

Band boundaries are set from the dashboard's overflow menu, under Configure Analytics Parameters. For each attribute you set the High and Medium thresholds; the remaining range becomes Low, and a preview alongside each field shows the resulting bands.

The defaults are:

Boundaries apply Project-wide and affect every widget that uses these attributes. Changing them reclassifies existing widgets immediately, with no need to rebuild them. Reset to Defaults restores the values above.

Adding Widgets to the Dashboard

To add a widget to your dashboard, click the "Add Widget" button. You can either select a pre-built template from the widget repository or create a custom widget from scratch.

Template Widgets

ACCELQ offers pre-built widget templates to simplify dashboard creation and save setup time. These templates are automatically generated based on your project's custom fields and execution parameters. Clicking "Add Widget" provides access to these templates, allowing you to choose one that fits your needs.

Template widgets not only provide quick insights but also help you understand widget configuration. Even if you plan to create a custom widget, these templates serve as a useful reference. Once selected, every template remains fully customizable, allowing you to tailor it precisely to your requirements.

Creating a Custom Widget

Creating a widget in ACCELQ is a straightforward process that lets you visualize your data precisely the way you want. Follow these steps to get started:

Step 1: Select an Entity

Begin by choosing the data entity you want to track. The available options include:

• Test Executions: Analyze test results across various environments, execution dates, and statuses.
• Test Assets: Focus on Scenarios, Actions, Test Suites, or other key assets within your project.
• User Activity: Gain insights into team productivity and updates made by users.

Step 2: Choose Asset Type

Next, decide whether to focus on Automation or Manual assets (based on your subscription to Manual and Automation product lines).

Step 3: Apply Filters

ACCELQ supports a robust set of filters that vary based on the selected entity. For example:

• For Test Executions: You can filter by execution dates, browser, app environment, mobile device/OS, customizable execution parameters, job type (e.g., CI/CD job, recurring job), execution user, and more.
• Analytics parameters on executions: When analyzing test executions, you can also filter by these attributes to narrow which Test Cases are included in the analysis. For example, restrict an execution trend widget to Test Cases whose flakiness is High.
• For Test Assets: Filters include custom fields, status, user activity, and the analytics parameters (stability, flakiness, average execution time) etc.
• For User Activity: You can track productivity metrics and updates made by individual users across project entities.

These filters enable rich analysis possibilities, allowing you to pinpoint the exact data you need to analyze.

Important: Multiple selections for a single field (e.g., “High” OR “Medium” for Priority) behave as an OR condition. Different fields stacked together (e.g., “High Priority” AND “Created by User X”) behave as an AND condition.

Step 4: Group Data

Grouping adds a layer of granularity to your analysis. You can group data by:

• Primary parameter (e.g., Executed by User, Browser Type etc).
• Secondary and tertiary parameters for multi-level insights.

For example, you could group test executions first by Application Environment, and then by Browser Type. This multi-level grouping enables a deeper understanding of your data.

Analytics parameters are available at every group-by level. For example, group Scenarios by Flakiness to see how much of your suite falls into each band, or group by Application Environment first and Stability second to see whether reliability varies by environment.

Note: When working with test executions, the execution status (e.g., Passed or Failed) becomes an implicit group-by that is appended in the end. 

Step 5: Select a Chart Type

Select the most suitable visualization for your data. Chart options include:

• Tables for detailed record listing views.
• Pie Charts for proportional data.
• Bar Graphs and Line Graphs for trends over time.

You can preview the selected chart with real data before finalizing your choice. This ensures the widget accurately represents the data you wish to track.

Note: The available chart-types is based on the group-by levels configured for the Widget. For example, if the widget is configured with one level group-by, then you could use either a pie-chart, bar-chart, or an area chart.

Step 6: Save and Add

Once satisfied, click Proceed to add the widget to your Dashboard. It’s ready to provide real-time insights at a glance.

Widget Interactions

Pinch Zoom for Focused View in Bar Charts

When a widget is configured with a large number of parameters on the x-axis, such as execution dates, viewing specific data points can become challenging. To zoom into a particular section, click and drag your mouse to draw a rectangle over the desired area, then release it. This will dynamically zoom into that portion, allowing for a more detailed view. If you need to reset the view, simply click the "Reset Zoom" icon to return to the default scale.

Clicking a Chart Segment for Detailed View

Widgets allow for interactive data exploration. You can click on a segment in a pie chart or a bar in a bar chart to drill down into the underlying data. Doing so will open a tabulated report that displays only the relevant filtered information. This report provides a structured view of the selected data and allows you to navigate to specific entities, where you can review associated metadata, track dependencies, and analyze relationships. This feature enables a deeper understanding of the data without requiring additional filtering or searching.

Report View for Comprehensive Analysis

For a complete dataset overview, click the report icon to open the entire widget’s data in a structured report format. Depending on the type of entity being analyzed, the report includes multiple columns that provide detailed metadata, timestamps, status updates, and additional context. Users can further refine the data by applying group-by criteria or custom filters to isolate specific insights. Additionally, the report can be exported to Excel or CSV, allowing for further manipulation, sharing, or integration with external tools.

Where a widget uses analytics parameters, the report shows the calculated value alongside the band, so you can move from a classification such as High flakiness to the actual percentage.

Laying Out Widgets

The Dashboard offers flexibility in arranging widgets to create an efficient and visually appealing layout.

Reordering Widgets

Drag and drop widgets by their headers to rearrange their positions within the Dashboard. This makes it easy to prioritize key metrics by placing them at the top.

Resizing a Widget

You can resize a widget by dragging its edges or corners to adjust its dimensions. A larger size is ideal when the widget contains a high number of data elements, ensuring better clarity and readability. On the other hand, a smaller size works well for quick metrics and concise visualizations.

As you resize, a blue highlight appears, indicating the widget’s new dimensions upon release. Resizing happens in discrete increments, maintaining a structured and consistent dashboard layout.

Inserting a New Widget in the Middle

Hover over the space between existing widgets to reveal a "plus" icon. Clicking this icon allows you to select and insert a new widget at that position. By default, newly added widgets are placed at the end of the current widget list, but this feature enables seamless placement anywhere in the layout for better organization.

Menu Operations on Widgets

Below is a concise overview of each Widget More Menu operation, which appears as three dots in the top-right corner of an ACCELQ dashboard widget:

1. Rename
   • Allows you to change the widget’s title to something more descriptive or aligned with your reporting goals. You can also update the description of the widget.
2. Edit Configuration
   • Opens the widget configuration panel for modifying filters, grouping, chart type, and other visual settings.
3. Clone
   • Creates an exact copy of the widget (with the same configuration), ideal for making variations without starting from scratch.
4. Delete
   • Removes the widget from your dashboard. This does not impact any underlying data, only the display of the widget.
5. Open Report
   • Switches to a detailed Report View, displaying the data records that make up the widget in a tabular format. You can further filter or drill down here.
6. Export to Excel
   • Downloads the current tabular data in an Excel format. Useful for offline analysis or sharing.
7. Copy Report Link
   • Generates a shareable URL leading directly to the widget’s Report View, which other project users can access if they have the proper permissions.

Dashboard Menu Operations

The overflow menu in the top-right corner of the dashboard offers operations that apply to the dashboard as a whole:

1. Reset Layout — restores widgets to their default arrangement without changing their configuration.
2. Configure Analytics Parameters — sets the High, Medium, and Low bands for stability, flakiness, and average execution time. See Analytics Parameters above.
3. Delete All Widgets — clears the dashboard. Underlying data is unaffected.

Data Synchronization & Update Frequency

The data displayed in the dashboard is synchronized periodically with the repository, ensuring that the latest project activity is reflected. However, there may be a delay of 30 minutes to 1 hour between actual activity in the project and its appearance on the dashboard due to the scheduled synchronization process. Users should be aware of this delay when making decisions, analyzing recent activity, or relying on the dashboard for time-sensitive insights.

To access real-time updates, users can refer directly to the Navigator Grid or Results Grid within the project.

Analytics parameters are calculated separately from the dashboard synchronization described above. They are derived from a rolling 90-day window of execution history and refreshed on an ongoing basis, so a widget grouped by flakiness reflects recent behavior rather than a fixed snapshot.

Tips & Best Practices

1. Start with Template Widgets: They quickly fill common filters (e.g., by environment or by custom fields).

2. Keep It Simple: Overly complex grouping (three levels deep) is powerful but can become visually cluttered. Consider separate widgets for simpler, more focused views.

3. Use Time/Instance Filters Wisely:

   • Given Duration for analyzing historical or date-based patterns.

   • Last N Instances for tracking consistency across recent executions.

4. Remember Real-Time Delay: There can be a 30–60 minute sync lag. If you just ran a suite and don’t see the data, wait briefly and refresh.

5. Explore the Report View: Clicking a segment in a chart to open its drill-down report is a quick way to see the underlying details.

6. Leverage Exports: Export to Excel for deeper offline analysis or for stakeholders who need tabular reports.

7. Prepare for Change: As your configuration (custom fields, users, etc.) evolves, some drop-down options in the widget editor may differ or disappear over time. The widget itself, however, continues to function unless it’s edited after certain fields no longer exist.

8. Tune bands to your context: The default thresholds suit a typical suite. If most of your Scenarios land in one band, adjust the boundaries so the classification actually discriminates. A 20% flakiness threshold may be generous for a mature suite and strict for a new one. 

9. Combine analytics with your own dimensions: These attributes are most useful crossed with something you already track. Flakiness by module, stability by environment, or execution time by Test Suite each turn a general metric into an actionable one.