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Idea validation - Engineering Insights

I'm currently part way through creating a product which aims at providing insights for engineering managers. Now that I've actually started working on it and have an idea of the direction I want to take it, I want to actually make sure its something people will want.

Basically, I worked as a senior engineer/tech lead as a while now and a lot of my job is making sure I am across the rest of the team and making sure people are on track and focused on what they are doing. Using tools like github at the moment doesn't really make this easy - to know all the open PR's across all the projects can be quite a pain as well as knowing other things such as team members who are struggling in certain areas, "bottlenecks" e.g. people who are relied upon by the team to do all the reviews etc.

so my idea is to provide a tool which is able to surface this information so engineering managers have access to actionable insights which they can act on. Basically it will analyse github organisations looking at a whole range of things like repos, pull requests, reviews, commits etc. to drive these insights. It will also provide analytics to analyse progress over time.

There are some comptetitors in this space - GitPrime and Velocity by code climate, however they are quite expensive and focus more on the analytics side rather then the insights side. I guess my value props is more so about actually providing insights from this information rather then expecting the managers to find it themselves.

I've attached some screenshots so you can have more of an idea of what the idea will look like. I'll most likely redesign it before launch but use it as a guage for what the product will offer.

on October 21, 2019
  1. 1

    Here's some of the problems I see at work. Maybe you can fix them one by one?

    • Unmerged 'green' pull requests (PRs).
    • After PRs are merged into master, we have a manual process of deploying it to production. A tool is needed here for sending emails/Slack notification of these.
    • PRs getting too big.
  2. 1

    Seems a nice alternative, but don't you think that processing all that git information, keep it pulling or listen for changes could increase costs (cloud, infrastructure) and then that will force you to increase price?

    Regards!

    1. 1

      GitHub sends webhooks whenever these events happen.