New: Discover the size and velocity of your team’s Development Activity

Tam Pham

This week, we’re releasing a brand new view in our development insights suite to help teams keep track of their progress and productivity: the Activity page.

If you’ve ever found yourself overwhelmed by raw data or spent hours trying to decipher the status of your team’s projects, this new Activity Page is designed for you. It’s a powerful visualization tool that presents an overview of size and velocity of development activity, by team and by engineer. What does this mean for developer productivity and how does this view impact your team? Let’s dive in.

A holistic picture of development

The Activity page is a dashboard specifically designed to give teams and engineering managers an intuitive understanding of development activity. It paints a clear picture of what’s happening in development, who’s carrying the bulk of the PR load and how the team is progressing through development.

Once you connect your Github org, Tara will collect all engineering activity data and visualize them using different colors and sizes, with each color symbolizing a specific type of development activity. Note: Gitlab and Bitbucket views are coming soon.

With this new feature, you can view the following:

  • Commit
  • Merge Commit
  • PR Open
  • PR Review
  • Comment

Note that the size of the bubbles shares different information about the work that your team is doing and their velocity. For example:

For commits:

  • The number of circles represents the number of branches the author worked on
  • The size of the circle represents the amount of work done in this branch by the author (“work done” = the total number of files edited in commits that were created by the author on that day)

For comments:

  • The number of circles represents the number of comments the author wrote
  • The size of the circle represents the number of words in the comment

For PR OPENED:

  • The number of circles represents the number of PRs the author opened
  • The size of the circle represents the total number of lines added & deleted when the PR was opened

For PR MERGED:

  • The number of circles represents the number of merged PRs the author created
  • The size of the circle represents the total number of lines added & deleted when the PR was merged

For PR REVIEWED:

  • The number of circles represents the number of submitted Reviews the author wrote
  • The size of the circle represents the total number of comments in the review

In the Activity page, by using the dropdown menu, you can easily view your team activity by repo, team, members, and period (by week or month). If you need to see team performance at a higher level, the aggregate views will help you understand engineering activity across each team, over an entire month.

See development activity by individuals

With this feature, there’s no more wading through endless streams of raw data. The visual representation lets users quickly grasp the type and volume of work done, individual contributions, and overall team productivity. The Activity page will be a powerful feature for teams, whether in evaluating performance or assessing team productivity.

Empowering Engineering Teams

  • Resource allocation: Designed to give engineering teams a real-time view of engineering activity and performance, this feature can help reveal patterns and blockers in the development process. It allows engineering managers to see who is carrying a lot of opened PRs, who owns most of the comments, how PR review work is divided, and more. These are important information that can help teams make better decisions on resource allocation and engineering utilization. For example:
    • If one team member is carrying the bulk of the PR load, your team may want to consider reallocating resources to prevent project delays or burnout.
    • A high number of comments might indicate a high level of traction, but it could also suggest confusion. Your team may need to look into where the misalignment lies, either within the task itself or within associated pull requests.
  • Communication: Our Activity page makes it easier for teams to discuss progress, issues, or revisions using the data visualized on our dashboard. Engineering teams will find it useful in providing updates to non-technical stakeholders on general development activity.
  • Predictability: By looking at your team’s activity patterns, you will be able to see trends and changes in productivity and velocity at a high level. For example, if a repo has a good amount of engineering activity, you can expect certain tasks to be done by a specific timeline. This information allows for better forecasting and planning for future projects.

More to come as we continue to grant access to teams.

Request access today.

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