Business Context

NexChip is bringing up a new server SoC before customer sampling. The validation team supports lab bring-up, test execution, bug triage, and regression tracking across silicon revisions, firmware builds, and test suites. The engineering director wants a dashboard that helps the team quickly assess program health and identify bottlenecks.

Metric Scenario

In the last 4 weeks, the team executed 18,400 validation runs across 6 labs. Overall pass rate improved from 71% to 78%, but blocker bugs open longer than 14 days increased from 19 to 31. First-pass bring-up success for new boards is 62%, below the 80% target. Average time from failure detection to owner assignment is 11 hours, and re-test turnaround after a fix is 2.8 days. Stakeholders disagree on whether the dashboard should emphasize throughput, defect quality, or milestone readiness.

Requirements

1. Define the 5-8 most important dashboard metrics for a validation or bring-up team, including one north-star metric and supporting leading indicators.
2. Explain how each metric should be calculated and why it matters for program readiness.
3. Propose how to segment the dashboard to diagnose issues by lab, silicon revision, firmware build, test suite, and severity.
4. Identify which metrics should be shown as daily operational views versus weekly executive summaries.
5. Recommend guardrails to avoid optimizing for raw test volume while missing critical failures.

Data Available

• validation_runs: run_id, board_id, silicon_rev, firmware_build, test_suite, test_case, start_time, end_time, result, lab_id
• bug_tracker: bug_id, severity, component, created_at, assigned_at, resolved_at, reopened_flag, root_cause, linked_run_id
• board_inventory: board_id, board_type, arrival_date, bringup_start_date, first_boot_time, owner_team
• milestone_plan: milestone_name, target_date, required_test_coverage, exit_criteria, program_phase