September 2005 Volume 9, Number 2

Introducing TurnOver Reports

TurnOver Release 5.4 Offers Enhanced Reporting Capabilities

By Paul Thiel, Director of Professional Services; and Mary Langen, Marketing Projects Specialist

TurnOver Release 5.4 will soon include a new reporting subsystem — TurnOver Reports — that makes key metrics more visible and easier for managers to access. Designed to plug into our Eclipse-based seats, TurnOver Reports provides a comprehensive suite of client reports based on many parameters within the TurnOver database. Best of all, TurnOver Reports is free with a TurnOver Development license, and will ship in the fourth quarter of this year.

"IT managers need good reports on development process and statistics to satisfy many demands, including the fulfillment of Service Level Agreements, productivity measurements, continuous improvement, and increased accountability within the enterprise," says Steve Gapp, president and CEO of SoftLanding Systems.

Our new and easy-to-use, on-demand reporting capability means that IT management can make informed decisions based on your company's IT metrics. For example, did you ever wonder what the overall throughput of change is for your key business applications or what the average close time is for your developer assigned tasks?

With TurnOver Reports you can:

Measure productivity and current workloads to proactively manage IT resources and identify issues before they become problems;
Track SLA requirements with exception reporting, response times, and billable time reports;
Obtain audit information such as forms in approval pending status, production level form activity, and complete task-level details;
Measure changes in key metrics over time to facilitate a program of continuous improvement.

A number of preconfigured, parameter-driven reports are included with the Reports subsystem. With many of the reports, you can filter down to the data appropriate for your needs by task, form, and so on.

Figure 1: An example of the new Key Change Management Indicators report
Click for larger image

Figure 1 is a sample of one of our CM Indicators reports, Key Change Management Indicators. At a glance, it provides you with information about change volume and effort expended over a specified time frame, your developer workload, and forms waiting for approval.

The reports also cover data from TurnOverSVN, our iSeries-based PC/Web source version control solution. The sample report in Figure 2 breaks out SVN commits — how many total commits were made, how many each developer made, and so forth.

How It Works

Before you install the TurnOver Reporting subsystem, you will need to ensure that your environment meets the requirements specified below.

Figure 2: An example of the
TurnOverSVN Repository Metrics report
Click for larger image

You must be running TurnOver Release 5.4 (dated December 2005 or later) and have any one of the following products installed on the client PC:

TurnOver Administrator
TurnOver Team Member
TurnOver for WebSphere Studio plug-ins installed in an Eclipse-based IDE
IBM WDSC 5.x or later
IBM RAD 6.0

In addition, the client PC must have the Crystal Reports 11 run-time installed. The Crystal Reports run-time will also be shipped on the TurnOver Client CD, and our installer will prompt you to load it if necessary. You'll be able to easily install TurnOver Reports from the December 2005 TurnOver Client CD by running the T54Reports.exe installer in the /Clients/Software folder.

The TurnOver Reporting subsystem is effectively a window to an "active location" — that is, a location that resides either on your local PC hard drive or on a shared resource somewhere on the corporate network. You have complete control over how your reports are grouped and presented, and you can tailor the directory structure, directory names, and even the report names to meet your specific needs.

The structure presented in the expanded subsystem (see Figure 3) is controlled entirely by the active location's contents. After you select a report you want to run, the Crystal Report viewer launches as a separate application. One of the most valuable viewer features — aside from sending output to the printer — is its ability to export reports in a wide variety of useful formats, including PDF, Word, Excel, HTML, and others.

Change Our Reports and Add Your Own

Because the TurnOver Reports themselves were developed using Crystal Reports 11, you can change existing reports and add new ones if you have Crystal report writing skills and the appropriate software.

To generate customized graphical reports against the TurnOver database, you must own Crystal Reports Developer. If you don't have this software you can, as always, run a query against the TurnOver database for a non-graphical report format. Refer to TurnOver Supplement #18, Creating Your Own Custom Reports, for more information about the structure and layout of the TurnOver database.

Summary

To take advantage of the TurnOver Reporting subsystem, you must be running TurnOver Release 5.4, December 2005 or later. Besides enhanced reporting, this latest release of TurnOver includes many new and exciting features we know you will appreciate. For a complete description of its contents, read the TurnOver 5.4 Memo to Users, which you can find on our customer support site (http://support.softlanding.com).

Remember that TurnOver Release 5.4 and the new Reporting subsystem are included with your Development license, so don't wait! Watch for the December TurnOver CD, and let the built-in reports help you better manage your IT department!

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