AI Powered Engineering Management

TLDR; Continuous software delivery requires continuous monitoring and management of Github PRs, Pivotal/Jira stories. Katella, a Slack AI assistant, does this on your behalf and let’s you (IC or Manager) know when you need to get involved buying you time. S/he also enables you to live by the calendar and finally block times to GSD.

10 years ago, you used to rent machines and hand deploy your code to servers. Now you have continuous delivery pipelines delivering code to elastic clusters of resources on the cloud.

10 years ago, you used to drive to a local BlockBuster store, walk the isles while sipping on a slurpy, pick out a movie, checkout, get your videos on the other side of scanners, drive home, pop the dvd in, wrestle with it for a little, get it to play and be stressed for the next 72 hours to find time to return it to the store before you get hit with fees ⏩ today you can stream any of thousands of titles in a few clicks from your couch on Netflix.

10 years ago, most people were still using waterfall product development methodology and teams were managed by single managers in strict hierarchies. Now you have iterative and continuous software development and delivery by highly functioning teams that have technical and managerial leaders working in concert to enable, support and elevate teams of engineers.

These continuous pipelines of software delivery require a lot of oversight and active management to make sure the pipeline is not blocked, slows down or that quality drops. A series of regular activities (standup, backlog grooming, retrospective, iteration planning) were developed to help manage these pipelines. Furthermore with an array of SaaS tools that enable the continuous delivery of software, managers, team leads and PMs find themselves spending considerable time tracking Github PRs and Pivotal Tracker/Jira stories while struggling to free up some time on their calendars to GSD(Get Shit Done). This is why we built Katella.

We felt this pain acutely as directors of engineering teams and saw managers and PM struggle to keep up and thought there must be a way that leaders can delegate many of these repetitive and grinding tasks so they can free up their time to focus on higher impact activities like building culture, roadmap planning and tools/technology assessments. Katella is an assistant that connects to software tools like Github, Pivotal, Jira, Outlooks, and Google Calendar and checks on your behalf for PRs and Stories that need your attention and proactively informs you. You can also just ask general questions and get things done by talking to it in plain english.

I’m gonna give you a quick preview of how Katella can turbo charge your teams.

Calendar

If it’s scheduled, it’ll get done. Ideas, efforts and plans are not real until they are scheduled and calendars like Google Calendar and Outlook help us do just that. They are the fundamental tool for GSD. I’m a big fan of having everything on your calendar, even the time you were going to dedicate to reviewing backlogs, updating on-boarding plans, researching technology options, etc. If it’s important and needs to get done, it should be on your calendar. That’s why I’m excited about the initial features we built into Katella for that. I use this myself several times a day. Here’s my typical workflow:

Highlights:

• Block time effortlessly (so you actually do it)
• Schedule meetings with others quickly with schedule awareness
• Always know what’s coming up

Pivotal/Jira

Even a whale broken down into pieces, is digestible. Every product or idea you have may at first feel like a daunting task until you break it down into smaller pieces (milestones) and even smaller individually digestible pieces (stories). Project management tools like Pivotal and Jira help you visualize and track these distinct pieces and enable you and your teams to make meaningful progress towards very big goals on a daily basis. However, many small pieces being handled by many different people introduces it’s own coordination and execution problems. That’s why we do daily stand-ups, iteration planning, retrospectives and backlog grooming.

While these softwares let you keep track of the million pieces you need (and sometimes don’t), they don’t help you proactively manage each story and project. You still need to make sure PRs are being looked at and driven to closure, stories are not blocked and blocking issues are communicated, if someone is struggling or taking a long time, you’d want to know to help them, pair them up, unblock them or just give them words of encouragement. That’s why we built the integration pieces for Pivotal Tracker and Jira. Our intent was to enable individuals and leaders to be able to ask questions about their projects and sprints and make informed decisions and adjustments. We went further by automatically gathering and pushing actionable insights to the users so they can concentrate on delivering and still have an eye on the team and make sure nothing falls through the cracks.

Highlights:

• Have context around every issue/story link shared in Slack
• Know what’s on yours or other people’s plates
• Find stories that are ready for code review or acceptance testing
• Have blockers and stories with high cycle time pushed to you daily so you can help unblock progress

Github

Software will eat the world, one quality piece of code at a time. Git has been a great tool for managing how the software gets developed and put together. I’m a big fan of onion development and incremental value delivery and git enables you to commit small pieces of, hopefully well tested, code together to build something great. Github has been the leader in the space and has made it really easy to visualize and collaborate on software development. One of the disciplines of continuous code delivery is ensuring pull requests don’t sit for too long because no one reviews them or discussions are inconclusive. Katella will proactively highlight these cases for you so you can be on top of PRs where you are involved or your team needs help push through.

Highlights:

• Have context around every PR link shared in Slack
• Know what’s on yours or other people’s plates
• Have insights like unattended pull requests and contribution leaderboard sent to you or your team’s channel daily so everyone stays on top of things

Actionable Insights

Best information is one I can act on. While interactively browsing these tools several times a day or asking questions from them through Katella helps you dig into areas that need attention, we realized through our time managing engineering teams that what we really wanted was a system that intelligently analyzed our various tools and pushed actionable insights to us. With the Daily Glance, that’s exactly what we tried to achieve. Instead of us chasing issues and looking for needles in the haystack (and often missing a few), now Katella can sift through all the data from our Pivotal, Github and Calendar and send us notifications on things that need our attention.

Katella comes with zero-inbox management feature so you don’t have to keep things in your head. Important insights from across Apps are pushed to you daily, with the option to Resolve or Snooze (which you can follow up the next day). Items are automatically resolved when actions are taken (blockers removed, high cycle item accepted, ..) in Katella or inside each app, making sure your daily glances always reflects what’s immediately actionable.

Lastly, you can push some of these insights to your team channels as well so the team can check on blockers and high cycle time stories daily or see each other’s contributions on Github.

Highlights:

• Actionable insights pushed to you or your team daily
• Inbox zero style management so you ensure everything is addressed
• Prevent anything from falling through the cracks

Fine Print: Katella is just in Beta and may be rough around the edges but S/he is always learning to do better. So if you have any suggestions for improvements or new capabilities let her know by just saying feedback.

Security: Katella take security seriously. all connections are over SSL, credentials are saved in encrypted form and data is retrieved only on demand and not cached or stored on the servers. Furthermore, data is segmented for each tenant, is never shared and is only accessible to the tenants’ authenticated users.

In 10 years, we sure will be doing things differently and it’s hard to imagine teams and companies building the next generation of amazing products and services without the assistance and automation of AI powered assistants like Katella that sift through mountains of data and are able to get the right insight to the right person at the right time and help create an environment where everyone thrives!