Axosoft Data with the Power of Embedded Analytics

Introduction

Axosoft is a leading agile project management software that helps agile teams to organize and plan their projects to keep their work on schedule and deliver faster. It allows users to create a project and work items, track work with configurable Kanban boards by assigning work to teammates, specify deadlines, and communicate about tasks within Axosoft.

You can now connect your Axosoft data with Bold BI to track your team’s projects and performance. Bold BI is a business intelligence dashboard and analytics software for creating, managing, and sharing interactive business dashboards with users anywhere in the world. In this blog post, we are going to explore the following topics:

• What is embedded analytics?
• How to fetch Axosoft data
• How to connect Axosoft data with Bold BI
• How to create Axosoft Release Management dashboard in Bold BI
• How to embed Axosoft Release Management dashboard into your application

What is embedded analytics?

Integrating analytical solutions and data visualization capabilities in any software application’s user interface to improve data comprehension and usability is known as embedded analytics. Bold BI helps you easily embed an analytics solution into your everyday work applications using a JavaScript SDK and server application. This helps you to reduce your dependency on IT teams and glean all the insights you need to improve administrative and workforce outcomes.

Now, let’s look at how to fetch data from an Axosoft account.

How to fetch Axosoft data

Axosoft provides REST APIs to fetch data from your Axosoft account. Developers can analyze and retrieve data in Axosoft software for releases, projects, items, and more. The base URL format for the Axosoft Web API is:

https:// <BaseAxosoftURL>/api/<version>/ <API_EndPoint>

Refer to the following table to connect Axosoft data and create a data source with appropriate APIs.

Let’s see how to connect fetched Axosoft data in Bold BI.

How to connect Axosoft data with Bold BI

Bold BI allows you to connect with the Axosoft data through a Web API data source. To do that, you first need to create an access token. Refer to this support documentation to generate the Client ID and Secret that will be used to generate an access token. With the help of the postman app, generate the access token and use it to create an Axosoft data source. Follow these steps to create a data source in Bold BI:

1. Click the Data Sources button in the configuration panel to add a new data connection.
2. Click CREATE NEW.

3. Choose the Web connection from the list of data connectors in the connection panel under Rest.

4. As a result, the web data connection window will be displayed in the panel. Specify a unique name for the Axosoft data source and provide a description (optional).
5. Provide an Axosoft Web API endpoint in the URL text box. Leave the default value GET for the Web API under the Method.
6. Add an authentication key and value under the headers. Set “Authorization” as the value of the Key and “Bearer <AccessToken>” as the value of the Header.
7. Set the time interval for Refresh Settings so that the dashboard can refresh itself. This will trigger the REST API request periodically and keep the data in sync with our dashboard.
8. Let the data format be JSON since release and project API endpoints return results in JSON format. Leave the default values for Authentication and Paging Type.

Click Preview and Connect. The preview window opens, listing the data results as seen in the following image.

Choose the desired columns and click Connect. Drag the table and save the data source. Finally, the Axosoft data sources will be added to the DATA SOURCES.

Once the data source is created, add the required widgets to your dashboard and connect data to them to visualize the metrics.

How to create an Axosoft release management dashboard in Bold BI

Let’s create an Axosoft release management dashboard with Axosoft data. Refer to the video “How to Create a Dashboard – Bold BI Tutorial for Beginners” if you’ve never set up a Bold BI dashboard before.

This release management dashboard helps product managers track the statuses of different project releases through the following metrics:

• Total tasks
• Cycle time
• Project completion percentage
• Utilized work hours
• Total items by date and status
• Release scope changes
• Release status
• User workload
• Items by type
• Items by project
• Estimated vs. actual utilized duration by user
• Items by priority

With a dashboard like this, you can showcase the progress of important tasks in projects involving different teams. You can break down results related to specific items by status and user. You can also analyze the release metrics of a project and monitor team tasks.

Let’s see how each of these KPIs can be plotted using Bold BI dashboard widgets.

Total tasks

The KPI card shows the total number of tasks closed versus planned. With this KPI, the team leaders can see how many tasks are completed and how many still need to be completed by the deadline.

Cycle time

The stacked bar chart visualizes the remaining work hours by user and status. Using this metric, team leaders and managers can review how long, on average, items stay in any given status of a workflow.

Project completion percentage

This radial gauge shows the overall task completion rate of all projects. Product managers and team members can track the actual completion percentage compared to the planned one. It is useful to them to plan accordingly to complete whole projects.

Utilized work hours

The radial gauge visualizes the overall utilized work hours of the planned work hours. With this KPI, team leaders can track and plan how many hours they need to spend to complete the whole project.

Total items by date and status

This stacked area chart showcases the total items by date with their statuses: open, in progress, testing, and closed.

Release scope changes

This stacked column chart visualizes scope changes by date. Apart from those planned, story points that are added and removed each day are also shown. Team leaders can review day-by-day measures of the amount of work that remains in a given release.

Release status

This doughnut chart shows the percentage of tasks in each status. Team leads can take the necessary actions to move tasks that are open, in progress, or testing to completed.

User workload

This bar chart visualizes the assigned task count for each user. Using this metric, team leads can view work assigned to each person and they can distribute tasks accordingly to users.

Items by type

This bar chart shows a comparison of the planned and actual task completion by type: task, epic, bug, and user story. With this metric, you can easily track which type of task is taking longer to complete, helping you plan task distribution.

Items by project

This column chart shows a comparison of the planned tasks and actual tasks completed by project. Using this KPI, a manager plan work accordingly to release on time.

Estimated vs. actual utilized duration by user

The bar chart shows a comparison of the planned time for tasks and actually utilized time by user. You can track utilized work hours and review how each user is performing.

Items by priority

This column chart shows a comparison of the planned and actual tasks completed by priority: low, medium, and high. Using this KPI, team leads can view and plan to complete the higher-priority tasks.

To learn more about the metrics and KPIs used in this dashboard example, refer to the Axosoft release management dashboard demo.

How to embed the Axosoft Release Management dashboard into your application

Let’s see how these analytics can be embedded into your application. Bold BI helps you embed your dashboards in apps for 12 web platforms, including ASP.NET Core, ASP.NET MVC, Angular, ASP.NET, and Ruby on Rails. In this blog, I am going to explain how to embed the Axosoft Release Management dashboard in an ASP.NET MVC application. Consider a scenario in which your IT department application has a website like the one shown in the following image.

Prerequisites

Download and install the Bold BI server on your local machine and create an enterprise-grade dashboard. You can find the installation and deployment instructions here.

Step 1: Creating an ASP.NET MVC application.

To successfully embed a dashboard in your application, first you need to create an ASP.NET MVC application. Open Microsoft Visual Studio and click New Project. Then choose ASP.NET MVC Web Application, enter the project name, and click OK.

Step 2: Configure embed properties.

After the ASP.NET MVC web application is created, you need to create a Model class called EmbedProperties under Models and provide the dashboard RootURL, SiteIdentifier, Environment, UserEmail, and EmbedSecret.

Step 3: Generate embed secret.

You have to set the EmbedSecret for authentication. You can get the embed secret from the Bold BI server. Then, navigate to the Settings icon in the left navigation bar and click the Embed tab. Click Enable embed authentication and then click the Generate Secret button to generate the embed secret. On clicking the button, a secret key will be generated, and you can paste it into the application. To learn how to do this in more detail, you can refer to this documentation link.

Note: Save the secret key, as it cannot be retrieved again. If you do not save it, you will have to generate a new one using the Reset Secret option.

Step 4: Create authorization server.

You need to implement an authorization server in the ASP.NET MVC application to get authenticated before embedding the dashboard from the Bold BI server. You can also configure the single sign-on (SSO)-based authorization server, which is an authentication endpoint that enables users to securely authenticate multiple applications using unique embed secrets. This prevents the need for users to log into different applications separately.

Step 5: Create Bold BI instance.

Finally, create a Bold BI instance to load the dashboard using a JavaScript file. Reference required script files and CSS files in the HTML pages.

Step 6: Run the application to embed the dashboard.

After successfully creating the ASP.NET MVC application, you need to run it. It will be launched successfully with the dashboard details. Finally, you can that see the dashboard created in the Bold BI server is embedded in your web application.

By following the previous steps, you can successfully embed your dashboards into your ASP.MVC application.

To learn more about embedding dashboards into your applications, please refer to this blog. You can also download the sample code mentioned in all these steps from our documentation.

Conclusion

So, now you know how to connect to Axosoft data and visualize important information from your account using Bold BI. Bold BI helps you to integrate dashboards in your applications written in React with ASP.NET Core, React with Go, WinForms, Node.js, Vue with Go, Vue with Core, and more, seamlessly. It will help you save time and prevent you from doing redundant work.  You can create a dashboard as you like with Bold BI’s 35+ widgets and 150+ data sources. Click this link to explore more of its features.

Get started with Bold BI by signing up for a free 15-day trial and create more interactive business intelligence dashboards. You can contact us by submitting questions through the Bold BI website or, if you already have an account, you can log in to submit your support question.