Milestone 3

Maintaining Existing Infrastructure

Remember that all business decisions should be compounding over the semester, and thus that you should ensure that all existing dashboards for past milestones remain functional and accurate to the data at hand. This may be as simple as not touching what was done before, and everything still works. But if you need to make architectural changes (which should be documented with an ADR!), it may require revisiting older milestones to ensure they still operate correctly. In general, you should plan on each business decision mapping to a single dashboard. You could reuse components of existing dashboards, but it should be clear in Grafana what business decision each dashboard maps to. Keep in mind that for these assessments, what matters is the accuracy and degree to which the provided dashboard helps inform the business decision. The technical means by which you compiled and created that dashboard is not considered here, but should be included in your documentation.

The Business Question

For this third milestone, we are revisiting our postponed business decision from earlier this semester now that we have more information!

Decision 1

While Prague’s metro system is known for its speed and efficiency, recent anecdotal complaints suggest that travel times may be creeping upward. Whether it is lingering platform congestion, increased transfer activity, or subtle slowdowns in service frequency, the operations team needs a baseline to validate against whether these perceptions reflect a measurable trend. By analyzing ride durations across multiple facets, including but perhaps not limited to days of the week, hours of the day, zones and fare types, planners can spot patterns in how long riders are spending in the system. Understanding the distribution of ride durations-and how they vary across various dimensions-can help prepare the operations team to uncover hidden inefficiencies, assess passenger flow, and fine-tune schedules in the future.

Shifting Dimensions

Keep in mind that dimensions can be shifting! This perhaps could play a greater role this milestone than past milestones, owing to the dimensions involved. Ensure your pipeline is handling these changese properly!

Efficiency Considerations

In order to provide insight to the business decision, you are likely going to need to map taps to starts or ends of various rides. There are a wide variety of approaches to doing this, and they can vary massively in efficiency and processing time. Unless you want to wait a very long time, I’d strongly recommend against querying the document database for each tap.

Assessment

You will be assessed on the following for each dashboard/business decision:

Category	4 – Exemplary	3 – Proficient	2 – Developing	1 – Insufficient
Relevance to Business Question	Dashboard clearly and directly answers the question; all content is purposeful.	Dashboard mostly answers the question; minor gaps or tangents present.	Partially answers the question; some visuals are only loosely related.	Does not address the business question meaningfully.
Analytical Insight and Context	Provides thoughtful analysis and useful context; insights go beyond surface-level.	Provides some interpretation or context; insight is basic but present.	Interpretation is minimal; context is unclear or overly simplistic.	No analysis or meaningful interpretation provided.
Accuracy and Reproducibility	Data is accurate and internally consistent; results could be closely replicated.	Minor inaccuracies or unclear methods; mostly consistent and plausible.	Not clearly reproducible; errors or inconsistencies raise concerns.	Major inaccuracies or contradictions; cannot be trusted.
Design and Aesthetics	Visually appealing and easy to interpret; layout, labels, and colors enhance clarity.	Clear design with minor layout or labeling issues.	Layout or chart choices hinder interpretation; lacks polish.	Poorly designed; unclear or disorganized layout and labels.
Communication and Presentation	Titles, captions, and text are clear, professional, and aid interpretation.	Generally well-communicated; minor missing or unclear text elements.	Explanations are vague, sparse, or unhelpful.	No explanations or guiding text; confusing to the intended audience.