Ops

Dashboard hygiene for QA leads

7 min read · Checklist

Printed analytics charts on a desk

Dashboards accumulate like kitchen drawers. Useful once, then crowded. This monthly pass keeps application analytics for testing coverage insights from becoming decorative.

Ask each tile three questions

Who requested it? When was it last used in a decision? What would break if we hid it for two weeks? If you cannot answer the second question, archive the tile instead of debating taste.

Rewrite definitions in public

Put metric definitions where newcomers look first — often the README adjacent to the CI job, not a Notion page that expired. Include the filter set, the exclusion list, and the timezone of the rollup.

Schedule deletions

Pick a recurring thirty-minute slot. Delete or demote at least one tile. Celebrating deletion keeps the culture from treating every chart as permanent furniture.

Teams in our Dashboard Hygiene Lab finish with a shared “retired metrics” log. It sounds bureaucratic; in practice it prevents zombie KPIs from returning during the next tooling migration.

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