Companies have a lot of valuable data waiting to be discovered. What companies usually measure is just the tip of the iceberg. Analytics is the way of discovering insights from that data. An area where analytics is often not used to its fullest potential is for understanding Software Development processes.
Because today’s companies heavily depend on software as a crucial asset, they need to understand and manage how that software is built. Thus, if you want to rely on metrics and data analysis to make better decisions, you should observe how your software development teams are performing, the activity within the teams, and how your developers interact among different projects.
To effectively apply analytics in the context of software development, or any context, you need to have clarity of you organizational goals. Without knowing your goals, doing data analysis is like searching for a needle in a haystack but without knowing what the needle looks like.
Software Engineering Team Leads and Managers, for example, have a lot of data about their software teams. This data is available in the code repositories, communication channels, and issue trackers to name a few. From this data, the managers may want to understand where blockers in the development process are, how well teams are collaborating on shared code bases, or what code segments are being neglected.
The Bitergia Analytics offers 4 services that are a complete solution to get these and other insights about software development projects. It is a comprehensive solution that includes an analytics platform, training, and consultancy to make the most use of it. Customers of the Bitergia Analytics services are equipped to reach their goals and make data-driven decisions about their software development teams. This is achieved through 4 services, which we describe below.
1) Define a strategy
Sun Tzu said once, “Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy are the noise before defeat.” This means that before thinking – let’s use data tools because that gives us data and data is cool – take a step back and ensure that your overall strategy is defined. Do you know how you plan on winning in your marketplace? What kind of data strategy do you need? How will it help you to achieve your goals?
How Bitergia Analytics helps you to define a strategy?
With more than 15 years of research experience in analyzing software development processes, especially in collaborative environments, Bitergia helps organizations to focus a strategy around software development to achieve the organization’s business goals.
Use case: For instance, a company willing to lead, from a Software Development Analytics point of view, we might set an objective like having low development and deployment time. To achieve this, the company could have a mentoring program as one of the tactics.
2) Start the analysis
Once you’ve got a strategy, it’s time to define questions, and metrics to answer those questions.
How Bitergia Analytics helps you to define an analysis?
Again, our long experience extracting information from software development data helps to define questions aligned with the goals the organization wants to achieve, to measure how far or close they are, and if the policies and processes applied are helping or not to achieve them.
Use case: There are some simple questions and metrics we could look at to see how we are performing:
- How long does it take to solve issues or merge requests?
- How many iterations (conversations) are needed to solve issues or merge requests?
- Whose issues and merge requests are solved faster?
- Who are the core reviewers?
- Which merge requesters are improving (less time to get merge requests accepted)?
3) Data Customization
Every company will need different metrics that solve their questions, this means that there is not a single tool to solve all of them, and some sort of customized dashboards or reports will be needed to collect aggregated information within a consistent single platform.
How Bitergia Analytics helps you to customize your data tooling?
One of the added values of Bitergia Analytics, beyond our knowledge about software development processes, is the tooling used to analyze those processes. 100%, free, libre, open source software, GrimoireLab is the Bitergia Analytics core service, supporting more than 30 different data sources, with a set of predefined dashboards, and with the excellent enterprise-class support provided by Bitergia, that, of course, includes customization for clients analysis.
Use case: By analyzing git, GitHub, or GitLab, and perhaps some communication channels like mailing lists, slack or matter most, we could have data enough to answer previous questions. With 3-4 dedicated panels, focusing on the time to solve/answer metrics would be a good starting point.
4) Easy Reporting
All this work will be nonsense if we are not able to get actionable insights. With the previous information that we are visualizing, we need to turn them into valuable data and actionable insights and make it as easy as possible.
How Bitergia Analytics helps you to have easy reporting?
Once again, Bitergia Analytics core service can provide a consistent reporting mechanism, no matter the diversity of projects to track or analyze. Not only because of the custom dashboards described previously but because of the possibility to consume its data through a secured REST API that allows organizations to connect these data with their own Business Intelligence tools.
Last but not least…
Bitergia Analytics Services helps companies and organizations to understand and to improve the software development projects that matter to them. Without taking into account their IT development processes, companies and organizations will not able to succeed in their Digital Transformation roadmap.
The service provides you with a single source of information and saves you hours switching between different platforms to get the data and metrics you need. Read more about Bitergia Analytics here!
🦉 Do you have questions about it?
Contact us and we will help you with them, and also you can request a demo to find out all the tools that Bitergia Analytics offers to you!
