Measuring the quality of an application continuously has no value unless it is acted upon. Dashboards can be a powerful tool for gaining continuous insight into the current level of quality and how quality has changed over time.

Most code quality tools have built-in reporting options, and they can be valuable for quality assurance engineers. They provide detailed insight into which parts of the application are of higher quality and which types of issues recently occurred more frequently.

The downside of this type of dashboard is that they can be hard to read and that they are not in the tool where developers perform most of their work. For this reason, it can be beneficial to also create dashboards in Azure DevOps to report on quality. An example of such a dashboard is shown in the following screenshot:

This dashboard shows an overview of the current quality and application code, as well as some recent history. Here, you can find the following information:

• The number of recent changes is shown on the top, along with the result of the most recent SonarCloud Quality Gate outcome, which currently reads Passed.
• The results of the two different builds in this project are shown in row two.
• Rows three and four show aggregations all of the builds and releases within the project. Symbols are used to denote the status of the builds and releases: successful, failed, or still running.
• On the right, two widgets are used to show the percentage of failed tests and the corresponding number of failed tests over the last 10 builds.
• The results of the latest release runs per environment are shown below this.

Dashboards such as these can be created per team or per project using built-in widgets or extensions. There are many extensions available in the Azure DevOps marketplace. For example, in the preceding dashboard, the Team Project Health extension is used.

Azure DevOps dashboards can be configured to automatically refresh every five minutes, making them usable as wallboards as well.