5 ways Squadlytics helps your team get a better flow
One of the hardest thing to do back in my previous job was to keep having great focus and momentum on projects. The team was awesome and we were doing exciting things, but when you work on initiatives that take a few months to get in the hands of customers it’s sometimes hard to keep the energy high as you get into a routine.
There are things that help of course, such as dividing efforts into smaller milestones, iterating quickly and getting early feedback. But while we have a lot of tools to help understand how customers are doing there aren’t many options out there to see how your team is doing.
This is what we want to address with Squadlytics. Beyond the analytics it’s a team assistant that keeps the pulse on your projects and helps you get rid of bottlenecks.
1. Issues, code, builds and release data in one place
Not everybody is doing microservices the way Netflix does it but there is an undeniable trend of breaking down projects happening in software development. Your UI is in one repository, your backend in another. There might be another repo for your Docker images, and some shared libraries as well. And let’s not forget the mobile clients, the documentation and the static website.
The same goes for your issues. It’s not uncommon to split boards into sub-team backlogs to make it easier to manage. Instead of having a unique list of issues to go through you can have squads that focus on different goals.
Breaking down things in smaller components is a good thing to do, and I’m a total advocate for it. But here’s the catch: the more repositories, boards and environments you have, the harder it is to know what is going on overall. Not only do you have to log into multiple tools, but you also need within each service to navigate to different places to get a good understanding of the state of your project.
With Squadlytics we’re solving that by aggregating data from the services you’re using to build and deliver your product. You’ll only need to go to one place to understand your velocity, quality and release cycle.
Our goal is not to replace your project management and development tools. Our goal is to make it easier for you to know what you should care about.
2. Smart dashboards for product teams
We had 2 paths to choose from when we started building our dashboards:
a) Let you configure each dashboard and graph individually.
or
b) Be opinionated and make the decisions for you.
We chose the latter for the same reasons we’re building Squadlytics. We want to help you save time sorting out information coming from all the boards, repositories and environments you have. You just need to connect your tools to start seeing relevant activity charts and metrics.
We’re striving to build a platform that will help product teams get great insights on their activity from day 1 without having to tweak the configuration or plan a meeting to brainstorm business metrics.
Of course we also believe in the importance of finding the right KPIs, and there are great platforms that can help you with advanced statistics. But there are also simpler metrics that can help everyone on the team to get a better understanding of their work.
3. Recent activity & long term trends
Product development is a delicate balancing exercise. You need to have a strong strategic vision for your future, but you also need to take care of tactical issues on a daily basis. Our platform is built to reflect that — you can both identify problems that need to be addressed right away and also check if changes to your workflows are improving velocity and quality over the long run.
For instance you have project summaries that keep track of items currently in progress. This is focused on the current week and gives you a quick overview of the state of the release.
And you also have charts showing you longer trends in your activity. In our case you can see that we took a good break over the Christmas period (because rest is great), and our activity has already picked up back to its previous level.
4. Automated reporting
Of course we wouldn’t be scratching our own itch properly if we didn’t have a way to avoid having to browse each project on our platform project to get an overview of your business.
You can select the projects you want to watch and get a weekly summary of the activity. We do not want to kidnap your attention, so we are making it easier for you to get the information you need, when you need it.
5. Activity alerts (coming soon)
This is one of the upcoming features we’re the most excited about. With activity alerts you can define rules that should trigger alerts if they’re breached.
This can help you keep track of pull requests and issues that are overdue as well as making sure that you’ll be notified if there’s a sudden drop in the quality of the code. Basically this what will turn Squadlytics into an assistant that can help you identify collaboration issues.
In the spirit of reducing configuration we’re coming up with a set of sensible defaults but you will be able to change the settings to make sure that it fits your team workflow.
Join us today!
This is just the beginning for us and we have an exciting road ahead. You can go to our website today to join the beta and you can also follow us on Twitter to get more updates. Don’t hesitate to leave a message here if you have any question!
