Adding live charts

Live charts are a type of report that provides advanced charting capabilities across all of your development and testing artifacts. Use these reports to monitor overall progress or a specific part of a project in real time. Helix ALM includes several types of live charts, including column, bar, line, pie, and scatter charts. Each chart has several variations to help you chart data exactly as you want to view it.

You can open live charts in one or more standalone windows, which can help you continuously monitor key indicators and team progress throughout the day as you perform other work. For example, you may want to use a live chart to display an overview of the actual hours spent on items versus the estimated hours to see how a project is progressing and identify any overruns. You can also open live charts in the Folders list window to chart the contents of a selected folder and view more focused data for a specific part of a project, release, or iteration. See Viewing live charts.

You can add live charts based on one item type or a combination of types. You can also limit the items included in the chart to a specific folder. For example, you may only want to include issues and manual test runs for a specific release or iteration.

To add a live chart, you configure the following information: chart type, data to include, fields for the X and Y axis, and legend position. Each field you add to the chart is a series, which is a group of related data points. Each series is listed in the chart legend. Most charts support multiple series. Conical, meter, and pie charts only support one series.

Live charts can only be viewed in the Helix ALM desktop client. If you want to create a similar chart that users can manually update on a dashboard in both the desktop and web clients, you can copy the live chart settings to a chart widget. See Adding dashboard chart widgets.

1. Choose Create > Report.

The Select Report Type dialog box opens.

2. Select Live Chart and click OK.

The Add Live Chart dialog box opens with the Type tab selected.

3. Enter a Name and Title. The title is displayed at the top of the chart. You can enter up to 128 characters for the name and 1000 characters for the title.

4. Select a Share with option.

  • No one prevents all other users and customers from viewing the chart.
  • Everyone shares the chart with all users and customers.
  • All users shares the chart with other users.
  • All customers shares the chart with customers.
  • Security groups shares the chart with selected security groups.

5. Select a chart type in the left pane and then select the chart to create in the right pane. See Live chart types.

6. Click the Source tab to select the data to include in the chart.

  • Select the item types to include in the chart. Optionally select a filter for each type if you only want to include specific items in the chart. Interactive filters are not available for live charts. Click Create Filter to add a filter. See Adding filters.
  • Select Items in folder to only include items in a specific folder. Click Browse to select a folder. Select Recursive to include any child folders.
These options are not applied when viewing live charts in the Folders list window. To limit items displayed in the chart from the Folders list window, you can select options from the Show and Filter lists, select the List recursively option, and then select the folder to view data for.

7. Click the X-Axis tab to specify the data to display on the horizontal axis. See Configuring the live chart X-axis.

8. Click the Y-Axis tab to specify the data to display on the vertical axis. See Configuring the live chart Y-axis.

9. Click the Legend tab and select the position of the legend relative to the chart.

10. Click Preview to preview the chart to make sure you configured it correctly.

11. Click Add.

The live chart is added.