Indeed. I think the most interesting and worthwhile reporting hinges on having pretty rich metadata attached to the tickets, so you can answer questions like how many man-hours did feature X take? how much over the estimate was that? how consistent is that compared with prior similar features? stacking up the critical path from now until release, and given the present estimates and past history, what timeframe are we looking at?
But to really get anywhere with that you need everyone to have put in the required metadata, to be correctly linking tickets that block each other, to be providing estimates upfront and tracking time, to be accurately capturing the work in tickets. You also need people not to be sandbagging and then using the "extra" time to perform localized refactors and other cleanup that they can't otherwise get buy-in for.
This was exactly what LiquidPlanner did (probably does?). I can't speak for it today, but it was built as planning and scheduling first, task management second.
As a bonus we handled everything a ranges (that task? 1-4 days) so you'd get results like: this project is 90% likely to be done by a given date, 98% by this much later date you're going to hate.
$15 monthly per user, and I can't even demo the software without scheduling an appointment? LiquidPlanner might be the greatest software in the world but I can not schedule an appointment for a demo - my opportunities are far too spontaneous for that. This seems like software for people who like to schedule things - I need software for people who are forced to schedule things.
I don't actually have this, but the simplest thing (in my head) isn't possible natively in any tool I've used: I just want to report on "we did what we said we would do". That is:
- What did our team agree to do in the sprint (added to sprint at planning)?
- What got deprioritized (moved to backlog)?
- What got introduced during the sprint (added to sprint mid-sprint)?
- What got completed?
- What rolled over into the next sprint?
Obviously, I can audit every single story that was modified during the sprint, and/or make spreadsheets or custom BI reports, and stuff... but I don't wanna!
I used to work on a project management tool, and everyone wanted "reporting", but when you got down to what they needed it was usually pretty minimal.