Value stream intelligence platform provider Allstacks today added a free live dashboard populated with anonymized data that DevOps teams can use to benchmark their own progress.
Hersh Tapadia, Allstacks co-founder and CEO, said the company is making this data available to make it easier for DevOps teams to uncover bottlenecks in their software development processes.
As part of that effort, the dashboard includes pre-configured benchmarks for the following:
How many days per week do benchmark teams write code?
What percentage of issues are planned versus unplanned for benchmark teams?
What are the cycle times per issue type for benchmark teams?
What types of code do benchmark companies produce?
What is the average commit size for benchmark customers?
Allstacks has committed to making 12 months of data publicly available on the dashboard and said it will update that data on an ongoing basis. Allstacks customers, however, can also access five years of data to compare historical trends.
Tapadia said Allstacks plans to add additional benchmarks to a dashboard that can collect data via the various application programming interfaces (APIs) that most DevOps tools now routinely provide. The overall goal is to increase transparency into software development processes, he said.
Allstacks’ value stream intelligence platform uses machine learning algorithms and artificial intelligence (AI) models to identify projects that are at risk of not meeting delivery goals. That data is then used to analyze the impact those missed deadlines are likely to have on various business objectives.
Value stream management platforms automatically take technical metrics, gathered via a DevOps process, and match them to a set of key performance indicators (KPIs) defined by business leaders. The challenge many organizations still face is making sure they have the tools in place to collect the appropriate technical metrics and then define the KPIs that truly matter to the business. Once those metrics are gathered and KPIs established, organizations are then able to apply advanced analytics to the massive amounts of DevOps data they collect.
The concept of value stream management traces its lineage back to lean manufacturing methods, which called for each step of a manufacturing process to be continuously measured. As software development has evolved from being a craft to a process that is highly automated using DevOps best practices, an appreciation for the value of monitoring the impact of missed software development deadlines on the business has grown as organizations realize how dependent they are on software.
As a result, more organizations realize there is a clear disconnect between their business goals and development processes, noted Tapadia. Business leaders are especially anxious to understand how a software development project delay might impact future revenue projections. Rather than being a set of tools employed mainly by IT leaders to track software development projects, value stream management platforms make it possible for other stakeholders to track KPIs spanning multiple software development projects. It then becomes easier to make informed decisions about how to reassign resources across various projects as different bottlenecks are encountered.
It may be a while before organizations achieve that level of transparency into their software development processes, but as software continues to ‘eat the world,’ it’s only a matter of time before value stream management becomes a required set of DevOps tools for every organization.