Data-Driven Development: Building Custom Project Dashboards with the issues.do API

In modern software development, data is king. We track application performance, user engagement, and infrastructure costs with meticulous detail. Yet, when it comes to managing the development process itself—the bugs, tasks, and incidents—we often rely on rigid, one-size-fits-all dashboards that feel disconnected from our actual workflows.

What if you could build a project dashboard that shows exactly what your team needs to see? A real-time view of project health, with metrics pulled directly from your code, CI/CD pipeline, and error monitoring systems.

With an API-first issue tracking system like issues.do, this isn't just a possibility; it's the intended way to work. This post will guide you through the why and how of using the issues.do API to build custom, data-driven project dashboards that provide actionable insights and supercharge your development lifecycle.

The Problem with Off-the-Shelf Dashboards

Standard project management tools are great for getting started, but they often come with limitations:

• Information Overload: They display dozens of metrics, many of which are irrelevant to your team's specific goals.
• Lack of Customization: You can't easily combine issue data with other critical information, like build statuses from your CI/CD pipeline or performance alerts from your monitoring tools.
• Stale Data: The dashboard is a destination you have to visit, often representing a lagging indicator of project status rather than a real-time pulse.

This is where treating your issues as code—or more accurately, as data—changes the game.

An API-First Approach to Project Insights

issues.do provides a simple, powerful API that treats every bug, task, and incident as a structured data object. By using this API, you can move from passively viewing information to proactively building the exact tools you need.

Here’s why that matters for dashboards:

1. Total Control: You decide what to display. Focus on what's critical for your team, whether that's bug velocity, time-to-resolution for High priority incidents, or the current workload of each developer.
2. Real-Time Data: Your dashboard can query the API directly, ensuring the information is always up-to-the-second. See a new critical issue the moment it’s created programmatically from an error alert.
3. Deep Integration: The true power comes from combining data sources. Create a single view that correlates a spike in new issues with a recent deployment, or tracks the cycle time of issues alongside associated code commits.

Getting Started: Querying Your Issues

Before building a dashboard, you need data. The issues.do API and SDK make it incredibly simple to fetch, filter, and sort your issues. You can query based on any attribute, including priority, assignee, status, or custom labels.

Imagine you want to see all open, high-priority issues that need immediate attention. With the SDK, it's just a few lines of code:

import { dotdo } from '@dotdo/sdk';

// Assuming the SDK is configured with your API key
async function getCriticalIssues() {
  const criticalIssues = await dotdo.issues.list({
    priority: 'High',
    status: 'Open' // or any other status like 'In Progress'
  });

  console.log(`Found ${criticalIssues.length} critical open issues.`);
  return criticalIssues;
}

This simple query is the fundamental building block for any custom dashboard.

How to Build a Simple Dashboard Component

Let's walk through building a "Team Workload" component that visualizes how many open issues are assigned to each developer.

Prerequisites:

• An issues.do account and API key.
• A basic web development environment (e.g., Node.js with a simple frontend).
• A charting library like Chart.js for visualization.

Step 1: Fetch All Open Issues

First, write a function to pull all issues that are currently open.

import { dotdo } from '@dotdo/sdk';

async function fetchAllOpenIssues() {
  try {
    const issues = await dotdo.issues.list({ status: 'Open' });
    return issues;
  } catch (error) {
    console.error("Failed to fetch issues:", error);
    return [];
  }
}

Step 2: Process the Data

Next, create a helper function to process the array of issues into a format the charting library can understand. We want to count how many issues are assigned to each unique developer.

function calculateWorkloadByAssignee(issues) {
  const workload = {};

  issues.forEach(issue => {
    const assignee = issue.assignee || 'Unassigned';
    if (workload[assignee]) {
      workload[assignee]++;
    } else {
      workload[assignee] = 1;
    }
  });

  return workload; // Returns: { 'dev@example.com': 5, 'qa@example.com': 3, 'Unassigned': 2 }
}

Step 3: Visualize with a Chart

Finally, feed this processed data into your charting library. This conceptual example uses Chart.js to create a simple bar chart.

// This is pseudocode for your frontend application
import Chart from 'chart.js/auto';

async function renderWorkloadChart() {
  const openIssues = await fetchAllOpenIssues();
  const workloadData = calculateWorkloadByAssignee(openIssues);

  const ctx = document.getElementById('workloadChart').getContext('2d');

  new Chart(ctx, {
    type: 'bar',
    data: {
      labels: Object.keys(workloadData), // ['dev@example.com', 'qa@example.com', ...]
      datasets: [{
        label: 'Number of Open Issues',
        data: Object.values(workloadData), // [5, 3, ...]
        backgroundColor: 'rgba(75, 192, 192, 0.6)',
      }]
    },
    options: {
      scales: {
        y: {
          beginAtZero: true
        }
      }
    }
  });
}

// Call the function to render the chart
renderWorkloadChart();

Just like that, you've created a live, custom dashboard component that gives you a clear and immediate understanding of your team's workload.

Beyond the Basics: Advanced Dashboard Ideas

A simple workload chart is just the beginning. The issues.do API empowers you to build comprehensive monitoring and reporting tools tailored to your needs.

• Incident Response Hub: Create a dedicated dashboard that only displays issues with an Incident label. Show time-since-creation, severity, and current status, with alerts for anything unassigned after 5 minutes.
• Project Health Monitor: Track the average time-to-resolution for bugs over the last 90 days. Is it going up or down? Correlate this with the number of issues created per week to understand team capacity.
• Automated Stakeholder Reports: Write a scheduled script (e.g., a cron job or serverless function) that uses the API to generate a weekly summary email of all issues moved to Done and sends it to project managers.
• Git & Issue Correlation: Build a view that links issues to the commits that resolved them. Query issues by a sprint-3 label, then cross-reference their IDs with your Git commit history to analyze sprint productivity.

Build the Workflow You Need

Stop letting your tools dictate your workflow. With an API-first platform like issues.do, you have the power to build dashboards, automations, and reports that are perfectly aligned with how your team works. By treating issues as data, you unlock a new level of insight and efficiency, enabling true data-driven development.

Ready to build the project dashboard you've always wanted? Sign up for free at issues.do and start building with our API today.