i am currently working on a very very simple project-management/bug-tracking system, and i want to display the status (“horrible as hell” to “nice like a butterfly” ) of a project on its summary page.
The problem i have – how to determine said status, i thought about the quotient of solved/resolved issues, but this quotient is going to 0 as more and more isses are resolved. I also thought about issues/files, but then i have to monitor the count of files (whats gonna be hard b/c theres binary files i have to monitor so a svn or git binding is not possible).
sorry if i posted on wrong site – don’t sure if this belong to meta
This is highly subjective, but here’s my two cents worth after managing hundreds of projects.
Each project is so unique that you won’t find a suitable “automated” way of measuring the health of a project in the way you are asking. The best you can do is to display such metrics as-is.
For an overall project health status, the project manager should be responsible for analyzing the metrics you are providing and manually determining the health of the project.
Again, I know it’s subjective, but project management is as much art as it is science, and no software is ever going to be able to be able to nicely summarize the project status as well as a competent project manager. Even an incompetent project manager should be able to give a better status report than the computer. All the computer do is spit out stats. It takes someone who knows how to interpret the stats to put the stats in a nice “executive-level” summary.