Changelog

May 29, 2023

Running a software team is a balancing act. You’ll want to ensure that as you build new things, you also address your technical debt and invest in productivity improvements. See also our blog post sharing best practices for balancing engineering investment.

This summer, we’re releasing a whole bunch of updates to Swarmia’s Investment Balance. And today, we’re excited to unveil the first batch.

Now you can drill down to investment balance at any level of the organization, from a high-level overview to the work of individual teams. This update goes hand in hand with the support for team hierarchies we introduced last month. (You can set them up in Settings if you haven’t done it yet.)

In the following weeks we’ll introduce more exciting updates, including better drill-downs into a single category of work across teams, and tools for analyzing trends. We’re eager to hear your feedback on the update.

Reach out to us with the in-app chat or via email at hello@swarmia.com to let us know what you think.

More improvements

• Fixed an issue where the timeframe would reset when navigating in organizational insights.
• Improved the performance of issue insights, where some views would previously time out on longer timeframes.
• Lately, larger teams might have experienced slowness in the Work Log. We applied an immediate fix and continue looking into improvements that keep it snappy for all customers.

May 4, 2023

Every organization is unique, and Swarmia is designed to adapt to and reflect your organizational structure, routines, and ways of working. With our latest update, we're taking things to the next level, enabling engineering leaders and managers to get a clear view into the organizational hierarchy.

Now, you can create and manage nested teams and use all Swarmia features at any level of the organization. Managing nested teams in Swarmia is flexible, easy to set up, and easy to adjust as your company evolves.

Let’s take a closer look into what’s new:

Nested teams work just as you’d expect: they align with your organizational structure, and you can use most Swarmia features with teams on any level, including Work Log, Investment Distribution, and other features. You can also create Working Agreements and set up team notifications, including the daily Slack digest, for nested teams.

Nested teams are easy to configure. For teams with subteams, the work shown everywhere across Swarmia is defined as a combination of their subteams’ work. No additional configuration is required.

You can add direct team members to teams at any level, and team memberships can be managed in Swarmia and synced from GitHub automatically.

If you already have teams set up in Swarmia, it's easy to upgrade to nested teams. Navigate to Team Settings, create a new team, and add your existing teams as subteams. Work configuration will be inherited from subteams automatically.

Following this update, organization-level insights also got a new home in the app. In the following months, we'll keep adding more capabilities to the organizational insights, including improvements to DORA metrics, issue activity insights, and the investment balance.

Categorize issues in one click

Sometimes it’s easier to categorize work right where you see it. In addition to using flexible auto-categorization rules, it’s now possible to categorize issues manually — or override the investment category assigned by Swarmia automation.

To review uncategorized issues, navigate to Insights > Investment Distribution and expand the Uncategorized lane, where you can preview and categorize individual issues on the list.

Mar 15, 2023

Visualizing engineering work with views like Work Log and Investment Distribution has helped hundreds of modern software teams significantly improve their focus and flow. Our new Developer Overview aims to do the same thing — but this time with an emphasis on the work of individual engineers.

Developer Overview makes it easy to see what each developer has worked on and helps facilitate discussions about their work. It allows developers and their managers to:

• Make work visible. Identify who the developer has worked with recently, compare the ratio of own pull requests to reviewed pull requests, and navigate to past work items to analyze them in more detail.
• Visualize activity patterns. Quickly see all the projects the developer has contributed to and spot systemic issues like too much work in progress or working alone on bigger issues.
• Analyze focus. Assess whether the developer has been able to focus on the right things and maximize their learning and impact.

The benefits of Developer Overview

Developer Overview is not a tool for stack ranking individuals or reducing them into a single number. In fact, the view is first and foremost a tool for developers to learn and grow in their career. With it, developers can:

• Take initiative on their own learning and development
• Easily reference what they worked on, and figure out who to ask for feedback
• Analyze completed work and have better discussions with their peers and manager
• Back up career development discussions with data

How to get started

Access the Developer Overview by clicking on your own or any other contributor’s avatar anywhere in Swarmia. You can read more about the benefits and use cases of Developer Overview in our blog and the Help Center.

As always, if you have any feedback or improvement ideas, we’re all ears. Simply get in touch with your CSM or fill out this quick feedback form.

Feb 28, 2023

As we hinted in the previous changelog, we’ve been working on one final piece of the deployment insights puzzle: supporting GitHub Deployments as a data source.

If you’re using GitHub Deployments to track deployments across your repositories, you can now select it as a deployment source in Swarmia. This makes it even easier for you to surface DORA metrics and keep tabs on applications with multiple environments.

If you’re already using GitHub Deployments, we recommend this method over GitHub checks, as it will give you more accurate data and it’s easy to set up.

More improvements

• We introduced an option to export a team’s Investment Distribution in CSV format. This allows you to combine the team’s data with e.g., cost data to produce financial reports.
• Insights views now show longer default timeframes that you can use to analyze progress over the last 6 or 12 months.

Feb 16, 2023

We’ve made multiple improvements to deployment insights within the past few months. Here’s a summary of the changes.

We’ve made analyzing deployments easier by bringing them into a single view. You can see all four DORA metrics in one place and drill down to individual applications and deployments.

We’ve also simplified the configuration and added support for multiple data sources. Getting started with deployment insights only requires a few clicks, and you can easily switch between different data sources.

Manually tracking change failures takes effort, which is why Swarmia can now automatically detect change failures from version rollbacks and pull request reverts. You can also automate additional change failure scenarios through the Deployments API.

More improvements

• We’ve enabled automatic change-failure detection by default for applications using GitHub Check or PR merge data sources.
• You can now include commit information in the Deployments API payload.

What’s next for deployment insights?

• We’ll add support for GitHub Deployments in the coming weeks. This will make tracking applications with multiple environments even easier.
• We’d love your feedback — if there’s something we could improve, drop us a line at hello@swarmia.com.

Jan 31, 2023

Feedback loops are an essential part of Swarmia. Our working agreements allow teams to agree on how they want to work together and stay on track as they’re building new habits. Teams can subscribe to the Slack daily digest to get updated on all the exceptions to their working agreements.

Now if your team has a working agreement around pull request review time (e.g. "review pull requests in under 24 hours"), we'll send a friendly reminder to the pull request reviewer when a review is nearing the target. We’ll send additional notifications two days after your target, and then finally four days after it — after which we’ll go quiet. The new notification is enabled automatically for all teams with the review time working agreement.

This new notification is part of a series of improvements to the Swarmia Slack app we've planned for this year. Have feedback to share? Drop us a line at hello@swarmia.com.

Not using Swarmia personal notifications yet? Here's why you should. You can enable them in settings.

DORA change failures: auto-detection of rollbacks and pull request reverts

Measuring change failures can be tricky. There are many different reasons changes can fail, and often the data on these failures and what caused them doesn’t exist in any systems. We also wrote an article on how we suggest approaching measuring Change Failures.

We already support multiple ways to report change failure data to Swarmia. You can report Change Failures via our Deployments API or mark failing deploys and deploys that fix them manually in Swarmia.

Now Swarmia detects some common change failures automatically:

Rollback detection checks if the exact same version has been previously deployed to the same environment (e.g., production). If Swarmia detects a rollback, a change failure is recorded for the latest deployment before the rollback.

To detect reverts, Swarmia checks if any of the pull requests included in your deployment were reverting a previously deployed pull request (based on commit messages, branch name, or pull request description).

More improvements

• We completed internal and external security audits in January 2023. Swarmia conducts internal audits twice a year, and external audits once a year. Security is on the checklist for all the new features we build.
• You can now export data from your organization’s Code Overview in CSV format. This might be helpful if you’re looking to share Swarmia insights with stakeholders outside Engineering or use the data in third-party tools.
• We’ve added new pull request filters to Batch Size insights, including filters by status, repository, and author.

Dec 23, 2022

This December has been all about bringing DORA metrics to the next level, ensuring teams can get an accurate view of their deployment process, and follow change failures and time to recovery no matter how they deploy.

With the latest update, all deployments are now tracked in one place. We added improved support for multiple deployment data sources, which you can configure for each service or application you deploy. Let’s go through them one by one:

PR merges

This option is the easiest to configure, and it works best when you deploy continuously. When you first sign up for Swarmia, we’ll automatically use this method to prefill deployment insights for some of your repositories.

GitHub checks

If you run a GitHub check every time you deploy, Swarmia can use it to track deployments. This approach supports checks from both GitHub Actions as well as third-party tools like Jenkins or Circle CI.

Swarmia Deployment API

This is the most powerful way to track deployments in Swarmia. The Deployment API allows you to pass change failure information directly to the platform. You can also use our UI to manually mark change failures.

What’s next? We’re looking into automating change failure detection in the coming weeks, and we’ll keep an eye out for other deployment methods to support. Reach out to us at hello@swarmia.com if you have any specific wishes or ideas around this.

🔎 New powerful pull request filters are available in code insights

This year we introduced flexible filters across the app that power a significant part of the Swarmia platform and features like team code ownership, Investment Distribution, and issue ownership.

In our latest update, we bring the power of filters to cycle time insights, making it easier than ever to look at data from different perspectives.

👀 Emoji reactions for GitHub comments available to all Slack app users

We take pride in building the best engineering productivity platform that puts developer experience at its core. Thousands of developers use our Slack app every day to save time on routine tasks and focus on things that matter.

Now it’s possible to react to GitHub comments directly in Slack, adding color to your everyday conversations 👍 👀 🎉

🎉 2022 Reviewed: Swarmia year-in-review ping delivered to all our Slack users

We wanted to do something special this year to celebrate all the fantastic work software teams got done this year. If you had our Slack notifications enabled by yesterday, you should have received a friendly year-in-review ping from our Slack bot.

Did you miss out on your year-in-review ping? Make sure to enable notifications and reach out to us at hello@swarmia.com to get your personal 🎁 delivered!

More improvements

• Swarmia now identifies when a pull request has enough reviews to be merged. This is helpful if you require more than one approval for a pull request to go live. The changes are also reflected in the review rate chart. A PR is considered reviewed only once it has all the required approvals.
• Our review request notifications on Slack just got better. You’ll now see whether a PR is awaiting review or is approved and ready to merge (it’ll get a gentle strike-through at this point).

Nov 30, 2022

Every team is different, and we built Swarmia to ensure teams have complete visibility into all team-related matters.

By default, when developers write commits and create pull requests, we attribute all their work to the teams they are part of. This ensures no work falls through the cracks, and you get a clear picture of what everyone is working on.

With our latest update, teams have more control over work attributed to them in Swarmia. You may want to adjust team ownership when a team member works across multiple teams, or some PRs include exploration work that you don't like to be considered in PR-related metrics and alerts.

Keeping the app snappy

Building a snappy, data-heavy product at scale requires constant investment in app performance as we onboard more customers.

In the past few weeks, we’ve focused on making our most powerful views faster and improved performance monitoring to catch issues sooner. We already see significant improvements on average, and will continue investing in keeping the app fast for our users as we grow.

Experienced performance issues lately despite the updates? Let us know at hello@swarmia.com

More improvements

• 99.9% uptime and a new status page. You can access information about uptime and incidents affecting Swarmia users at status.swarmia.com
• If you use Linear as your issue tracker, you'll notice that we now sync Linear projects in real time as part of a larger effort around data consistency

Oct 25, 2022

One of our product principles acknowledges that every team is different. We haven't seen two software teams working the same way, even within the same organization. So we built Swarmia to adapt to the routines and processes of each team — no matter how they use Jira, plan work or collaborate — to create a smooth user experience.

Managing teams in Swarmia just got easier. Previously, if you used GitHub teams, these teams were created in Swarmia automatically. Now, you're in control: you can choose to base team membership on GitHub teams, add team members one by one, or do a combination of both.

Here’s how it works:

• Create a new team in Swarmia
• Add GitHub users individually or add entire GitHub teams to the team
• The GitHub teams you use will automatically stay in sync — so if team members change in GitHub, the changes will automatically be reflected in your Swarmia teams.
• You can add multiple GitHub teams and users to each team in Swarmia.

We’re eager to hear your feedback about this change. Drop us a line at hello@swarmia.com.

More improvements

• Configuring investment categories is now easier. You can review all uncategorized work in Settings to create better auto-categorization filters.
• Faster team onboarding. When you connect Jira to Swarmia, we now suggest to auto-assign Jira projects to teams for an even smoother onboarding experience.
• Better Jira custom field support. We added support for two new Jira fields: Advanced Roadmap teams, and Components. You can already use these filters in team ownership and investment category settings.
• Ongoing performance improvements. As we onboard more customers, some teams might have experienced slowness in the app. We continue working on performance improvements across the app, especially for larger organizations.

Sep 28, 2022

At Swarmia, we're building a product that enables organizations to have healthy conversations about their work and where they want to improve. In order to drive change, it is crucial to consider all levels of the organization — from one team to the company as a whole — and have a shared language for having team discussions, backed by data you can trust.

With engineering teams being Swarmia's core focus, we're proud of the data quality we've achieved for teams so far. In recent weeks, we've been doing the groundwork required to bring those insights to the next level (quite literally), enabling reliable, trustworthy insights across multiple teams and the whole engineering organization.

In the new organization-level code insights, you can see key metrics across multiple teams, including cycle time, review rate, review time, throughput — and more.

In the coming weeks, we plan to expand our support of the cross-team and organization-level features. As we do it, we take great care in surfacing data that enables a healthy culture of continuous improvement for everyone, from engineering leaders to individual developers.

More updates

• Using Jira custom fields to assign issues to teams? Now you can use custom fields to define investment category filters and Jira settings in Swarmia.
• When you send deployment data to Swarmia via the API, you can now provide an optional Description, which will be shown in the UI alongside other data
• Finding the right Jira projects to connect to Swarmia is now easier. You can search for projects based on their name or Jira key in Settings.

Aug 31, 2022

At Swarmia, we ensure your insights accurately reflect your processes and organizational structure. With our advanced contributor management, it's already possible to bring team member accounts across tools like Slack, Jira, and GitHub into a single profile so that all contributions are attributed to the right people and teams.

We also automatically identify and merge duplicate accounts, and if a team member happens to commit code using a new email address, we'll suggest linking it to an existing account.

With our latest update, in addition to importing teams from GitHub, you can also create and manage teams in Swarmia. Now you have more flexibility in managing team data without making changes to your GitHub organization.

Navigate to team settings to create and manage teams.

More updates

• Deployment insights: now you can customize your deployment insights by selecting a deploy branch for each repository.
• Change failure insights: we received reports of incorrect data being queried for some accounts, which we've fixed. Now the data is also grouped by day, helping to spot daily patterns (e.g., whether most failures occur on Friday).

Aug 17, 2022

We continue to introduce flexible data filters across the app. In addition to investment category filters, team ownership, and PR exclusions, you can now use filters in issue insights to filter data by label, status, issue key, and issue type. Now it's easy to slice the data in various ways and dive deeper into different categories of work.

The filters are saved in the URL, so you can bookmark or share what you see in Swarmia with others.

More updates

• If you want to limit unsanctioned code pushes to the default branch (master, main), check out our updated working agreement. It now alerts you on code pushes in the last 24 hours, while listing all commits pushed directly to the default branch over a two-week window.
• In Work Log, we made the dots for large commits bigger to help you spot major code contributions easier.
• Pull requests that you've excluded from metrics and alerts are now also excluded from Work Log and Investment Insights.

Jul 28, 2022

This week comes with a complete overhaul of our timeframe selection UI. Now the selected timeframe is preserved across all insights views as you navigate the app, and timeframe presets are more readily available.

More updates

• We completed an internal security audit in July. Swarmia conducts internal or external security audits twice a year, and security is on the checklist of every feature we build.
• We launched on Product Hunt, ranking as #3 Product of the Day and #4 Product of the Week.
• We added placeholder images for team avatars that we're unable to sync from GitHub, primarily for the GitHub Enterprise accounts.

Jul 14, 2022

Investigating cycle time issues just got easier with the new cycle time breakdown for individual pull requests. Just click on a pull request anywhere in the app to see the time it was in progress, waiting for a review, or awaiting merge. It helps to investigate and act on those outlier pull requests you can spot in insights and alerts on your team's working agreements.

Change failure rate & MTTR: link failed deploys with reverts and hot fixes

Measuring DORA change failure rate and mean time to recovery (MTTR) has many aspects. We recently published a post about measuring it the right way.

Sometimes a deployment goes through without failing but still results in an issue that requires a fix from the dev team. Now it's possible to tell Swarmia what deploys represent those fixes and link them directly to the deploys that caused the issue.

Doing this allows calculating time to recovery and change failure rate more accurately even for those deploys that technically don't fail but still end up breaking something.

Not measuring change failure rate & MTTR in Swarmia yet? Reach out to us at hello@swarmia.com to get started.

Follow working agreements targets from anywhere in insights

We brought working agreement targets closer to more places in insights, making it easier to adopt new agreements and review the exceptions right as you explore trends and patterns in your Swarmia data. You can find the targets across all Flow insights, as well as pull requests cycle time and review time insights.

More improvements

Most data in Swarmia stays in sync with other applications in real time. Merge a PR in GitHub and — boom — it's merged in Swarmia too. In some rare cases though, it's not possible to get the latest PR status on the fly. Now, if you notice pull request data that is out of sync, you can refresh it manually in Swarmia.

Jun 22, 2022

Swarmia was the first analytics app to integrate with Linear in September 2020. Since then, we've expanded on the features available to our Linear users, adding support for investment insights, flow insights, and Working Agreements.

Today, our Linear integration is officially out of beta, immediately available to connect in the Swarmia app. Now it's also possible to customize your Linear team mapping right in Swarmia to make sure the correct data is shown for all teams.

Use investment insights based entirely on GitHub data — issue tracker integration is no longer required

We've seen tremendous interest in investment insights this year, and we're constantly coming up with new ways to get 100% of your work auto-categorized within minutes.

We've added 14 new issue and pull request filters since we first introduced the feature — and with the extensive coverage of git-based filters, it's now possible to use investment insights entirely based on GitHub data. Having an issue tracker connected is no longer a requirement for using investment insights, and the feature is available to all customers.

Looking for a recap on the topic? Read our ultimate guide for balancing engineering investment .

More improvements

• We added an explicit setting for posting team review reminders in Slack. Review reminders are sent to the team channel when the team is assigned a review.
• We improved the way we sync personal GitHub data for our users. Now, if you change your name or avatar on GitHub, all you have to do is log in again for the change to take effect.
• Initial repository sync is now more robust, improving the onboarding experience for larger organizations.

May 31, 2022

Swarmia's Slack bot helps you get code reviewed faster, saves you time waiting on failing CI builds, and automates other routine tasks that bots do better.

With our latest update, you can respond to GitHub comments without leaving Slack. The bot's rich line-by-line comment previews make sure you have sufficient context to respond. This is especially useful on mobile or when addressing small comments.

If you've been waiting for a sign to{' '} start using Swarmia notifications, this is it.

Other updates

• We improved the previews of the comment bubbles in Work Log. Now, we also show comments posted inside threads, which we didn't before.
• Getting Linear and Jira insights in Swarmia is now easier as we show better onboarding instructions to teams that haven't configured them yet.
• We fixed an issue that caused some Slack notifications to be sent twice.
• We added a confirmation prompt when editing issue type mapping affects multiple teams in your organization.

May 10, 2022

Swarmia's investment insights help engineering organizations balance focus across roadmap work, technical debt, fixing bugs, and other investment areas. You can set up flexible filters to auto-categorize work according to your organization's needs.

With the latest update, we introduce more ways to auto-categorize pull requests, adding filters by label, repository, branch name, title, and status to investment category configuration, increasing the accuracy of investment insights.

Auto-exclude pull requests from metrics and alerts

Continuing with the theme of improving insight relevance, you can now auto-exclude specific pull requests from metrics, as well as the daily digest, for the whole organization.

You may want to auto-exclude revert or release pull requests, or draft pull requests used for research projects. You can exclude contributions by pull requests status, branch name prefix, title prefix, or repository. You can also exclude pull requests manually from anywhere in the app.

Auto-exclude pull requests in Settings. Learn more in the Help center .

Combine data from multiple GitHub organizations in Swarmia

If you happen to work across multiple GitHub organizations, now you have more options for managing your data in Swarmia. With our latest update, you can choose to combine data from multiple organizations or use Swarmia for each organization separately.

Learn more in the Help center.

Apr 25, 2022

When it comes to understanding software delivery performance, the framework introduced by the DORA team in the 2018 book Accelerate is the best-known one among engineering leaders.

Earlier this year, we published our guide to DORA metrics to help you understand how to get the most value from them.

Swarmia already had extensive coverage of the software delivery insights around change lead time and deployment frequency. Now we've improved our deployments insights, adding MTTR (mean time to recovery) and change failure rate for complete coverage of DORA metrics.

In order to calculate these metrics with Swarmia, all you have to do is inform Swarmia about deployments of your app and fixes to previous deployments (fix data is used to calculate time to recovery). You can then filter deployment insights by app and environment in Swarmia.

Contact us to get started

Performance improvements: improved page loads for data-heavy views and faster Slack notifications

As we onboard more organizations to Swarmia, we want to make sure the app feels fast even as you load historical data for hundreds of contributors.

Our latest performance improvements significantly improve page load times, bringing almost 50x improvements on some queries.

Interacting with Swarmia's Slack notifications should now feel snappier as well.

More improvements

• When you select a team anywhere in Swarmia, we now preserve your selection as you navigate in the app.
• We improved the logic behind the “Avoid working alone” working agreement, making sure only the issues that belong to your team are included in the exceptions.
• It's now easier to assign Jira issues to teams. When you filter issues by Team ID, we now show the team name behind the ID in the dropdown.

Mar 31, 2022

We improved how Jira issues are mapped into issue types in Swarmia and how issues are assigned to teams. The process is now simpler and more intuitive, with separate configurations for the issue types and team ownership mapping. It's also more flexible, supporting more filtering options for the team ownership. This allows you to adapt Swarmia to just about any Jira setup — we've seen a few, and no two are exactly the same.

• Less repetition — define issue types on the organization-level, instead of doing it separately for each team (e.g., “count as Stories any issues that are a Story or Improvement”).
• Quick team-level configuration — choose which issues your team is interested in (e.g., “issues in project X or any issue with label Y belong to team Z”).
• Smarter defaults — if your organization has newly signed up to Swarmia and you haven't customized your issue types on Jira, you don't have to do any issue type setup.

Check out our new guide to get more out of Work Log

Work Log is a powerful tool for visualizing the various activities of your team, but it can take a while to learn its full potential. We've collected some healthy and unhealthy patterns and made them available while you're browsing your data. You'll be able to open the new guide from the info button at the top right corner of Work Log.

Polished user experience for GitHub Enterprise Server

We've recently made investments to bring the GitHub Enterprise Server experience to full parity with cloud-based GitHub setups. Contact us to learn more about our enterprise offering.

Other improvements

• The Pull Requests view now displays separate sections for merged and closed pull requests, making it easier to analyze abandoned work and find pull requests that you've merged but forgot to link to an issue.
• We recently updated the default time span of Work Log to two weeks. You can now navigate this new view one week at a time, allowing you to investigate any two-week period.
• The “Link pull requests to issues” Working Agreement now only tracks merged PRs, so that work that's still in progress isn't flagged as an exception.
• We improved the logic for sending Issue summaries to avoid sending Slack updates about uninteresting status changes.
• Login failures caused by GitHub errors now clearly tell the user what happened.

Mar 14, 2022

We improved the logic behind investment categories to help teams make better investment decisions with Swarmia. Categories are now mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive, meaning that they don't overlap, and each issue can be linked to only one category. When you configure automated filters to map work to categories, it's now possible to specify the category order. If an issue matches multiple categories, we'll assign it to the highest match on the list. It makes investment insights more accurate and gives you more control over your data in Swarmia.

Filter pull requests by investment category

Another essential aspect of investment insights is transparency. Now you can filter pull requests by investment category and see cycle time, review time, and throughput for each category. It's easy to see pull requests categorized as Technical Debt or Firefighting and improve the way you deal with those issues in your team.

Merge and delete categories while preserving linked data

Once you start tracking investments in your team, it's not uncommon to merge or split categories to get a more accurate picture of the work. Now it's easy to move work between categories when you make changes. When you delete a category with contributions linked to it, we'll ask you to move contributions to a new place. No data lost!

2-week Work Log

We bumped the default timeframe of Work Log from one to two weeks to help you spot work patterns over a longer timeframe. We also improved Work Log data loading, and navigating between views is snappier.

Other improvements

• Contributor settings now allow showing all contributors at once, and bots are shown aside from other active contributors.
• Previously, we looked only at coding contributions to tell who contributed to projects in your issue tracker. Now issue assignees are included as well.
• We improved the login experience for our GitHub Enterprise customers.
• Issue activity popup is now wider and fits more data.
• We added a GitHub link to pull requests in working agreement exceptions to help you get more context in one click.

Mar 1, 2022

It's no secret that small pull requests are easier to review and merge than large ones. But often times, it is hard to put a finger on when exactly large PRs start to become a problem. With our new batch size insights, you can see how pull requests are distributed by size and spot patterns in the review process and pull request flow.

Support for multiple GitHub organizations

We want to make sure Swarmia adapts to various organizational structures, team setups, Jira configurations, and best practices followed in the teams — because every team is different. Now you can log in to multiple different GitHub organizations with Swarmia, making insights more relevant for companies with more complex organizational structures.

Feb 15, 2022

When drawing insights from data across different tools, getting data quality right is crucial. In Swarmia, there are multiple ways to ensure every contribution — commit, task, PR approval, or comment — is accurately attributed to initiatives and team members.

Some work can be automatically categorized with our investment categories and pull request filters. Alternatively, you can manually link contributions, giving you flexibility and control over your data in Swarmia.

With the improved Slack linking notification, it's easier than ever to link pull requests to issues or categories in one click. We improved the search experience and accuracy of linking suggestions. The notification is now available both for our Linear and Jira users.

Start using the new notification by adopting the working agreement to link pull requests to issues (or categories) in your team.

Share links to any issue or pull request in Swarmia

Each popup with issue or pull request insights now has its location saved in the URL, making it easy to share a direct link with others and discuss with the team whenever you notice an outlier or a pattern worth looking into.

Bi-annual security audit and performance improvements

We conducted our bi-annual security audit in December 2021-January 2022, followed by a security strengthening project. We're committed to our customers' data security, and security is on the checklist of every feature we build.

Another update improves the Swarmia experience for larger organizations. With the latest improvements to how we handle data, contributor settings for organizations with hundreds of contributors now load much faster than before.

Jan 25, 2022

We’ve made it easier to dig deeper into individual pull requests anywhere in Swarmia. Now you can select any PR in Insights, and Work Log to get more context, link an issue or investment category, or exclude outlier data from metrics and alerts.

• See commenters, reviewers, and the author of any PR at a glance
• Exclude outlier pull requests in one click
• Link pull requests to issues or investment categories
• In review insights, click on any dot to see all reviews of the highlighted PR at once
• The selected pull request is saved in the URL so that you can share it with others

Jan 13, 2022

Swarmia's investment categories are perfect for understanding where your team's time goes. Automated filters allow mapping all work to custom categories so you can get accurate reports on how the engineering teams' time is spent between roadmap items, firefighting, chores, and other types of work.

Work Log by investment category takes it to a whole new level. It shows all work by investment category — up to individual commits — in a calendar view. Use it to get insight into how daily decisions affect the investment distribution.

When do ad-hoc projects interrupt our focus? Do teams tend to focus on bug fixing at the end of the sprint? What technical debt issues got resolved this week? These are just some of the questions you can now answer.

New code insights and metrics

We've added a new code overview section to Insights, where it's easy to follow how your key metrics evolve week over week. Cycle time and Review insights got dedicated pages to help drill down to the data behind the aggregates.

There's also a new Review rate chart in Insights. It shows how many pull requests got approved before merging. Making sure all code gets reviewed improves code quality. You'll want to take action if the review rate falls under 70-80% of all work.

No more noise from bots

Teams love Swarmia's Slack notifications because they help them stay focused. However, review request notifications from bots had been contributing to unnecessary noise in team channels.

We won't send notifications about bots' review requests from now on. You can still see their review requests in Swarmia. Manage bots under Settings → Contributors.

Dec 1, 2021

Our automated working agreements have taken huge leaps forward this year, with more teams getting aligned on how they write and review code, maintain code quality, plan work, and improve focus on work that matters.

The latest update brings working agreement insights to more places in the app, and improves our Slack digest to make it easier to focus on that one pressing issue the team agreed to improve on. With all the ongoing alerts to working agreements highlighted, it’s easy to take action before a negative trend starts to form.

GitHub Enterprise is now supported

We’ve added GitHub Enterprise to the list of our supported tools. Earlier this fall, we also added support for Jira Server, increasing our coverage of on-premise integrations.

Swarmia is now more than ever equipped to serve larger engineering organizations, driving continuous improvement in software teams at scale. Contact us to learn more about our enterprise offering.

Performance improvements

In November, we onboarded more new organizations to Swarmia than ever before. As a result of the increased application loads, some users may have experienced slowness in the app. With the latest performance improvements to data queries, the app is now faster for all users.

Nov 8, 2021

Software development is all about focusing on the right things, but even for the best teams it’s not uncommon to see up to 70% of all work not reflected on the roadmap: it can be bugs, customer requests, technical debt, or chores that end up taking their time.

With the new investment insights you can track these (and any custom) categories in Swarmia, and get an accurate, highly customizable view into how teams spend time.

Seeing this data was an eye-opening experiences for many of our customers, sparking great discussions, and resulting in even more focus on work that matters.

Encourage team collaboration with the new working agreement

Working alone on a large project can feel demotivating and slow. In the long term, it leads to situations where only one person is familiar with a project or codebase. And if they get blocked while working alone, or go on a vacation, it’s challenging for somebody else to join in and help.

Now there’s a working agreement to help you identify and review projects with solo contributors.

Other improvements

• We've added initial support for GitHub Issues as an issue tracker.
• Now you can see both who’s been assigned to an issue and who has completed it in Work Log.
• If you're using Linear, you'll see all contributions to Bugs grouped to a dedicated row in Work Log.
• Swarmia is now SOC 2 Type 1 certified. We've completed our SOC 2 Type 1 certification in our ongoing commitment to keeping your data secure. Security has been in Swarmia’s DNA from the very beginning. We conduct security audits and training every six months, and security practices are on the checklist for every new feature we build.

Oct 1, 2021

When we share these updates with you, we look back at what we’ve shipped in the past weeks that’s worth celebrating. It turns out there’s no better tool for that than Work Log. It is a snapshot of how teams spend time week over week, making it easy to tell the theme of the week at any time in the past.

You can now see issue completions as dots in the Work Log. This allows you to see work without code commits and gives you a better sense of how projects are moving forward.

Focusing on data quality in Work Log enables us to build insights you can trust. This data powers our Investment Insights that we’re working on improving now, and we can’t wait to share more soon.

Exclude individual pull requests from all metrics

Metrics can be a black box, so we show the individual data points behind all numbers you see in Swarmia. Outliers can have a significant effect on those numbers. Now you can exclude individual pull requests from all metrics to make your Swarmia insights even more accurate.

On-premise Jira support

We haven’t seen two teams who wor in the same way, and build Swarmia to adapt to your team’s tools and ways of working. If your organization uses Jira on-premise, we now support that too. 

Aug 18, 2021

Celebrate when you get a larger project completed with a new team notification. Get a summary of the key metrics like scope creep, active days, longest-running tasks, and more — right in Slack. We continue to invest in automated tools for categorizing work. Now you can link pull requests to investment categories automatically by adding a rule to auto-assign work to categories based on PR titles.

Customize your daily digest

In Swarmia, when teams agree on an improvement area, they adopt a working agreement. It’s the starting point to measure where the team is at right now and to set a goal for the future.

But setting a goal is no guarantee that change will follow. Things tend to get lost and forgotten, and what’s brought up in retrospectives is not always taken forward.

80% of teams using Swarmia get our daily digest that provides a feedback loop for their continuous improvement goals. It contains a daily status update on all working agreements and a summary of actions required from the team. Now you can choose what data to include in the digest.

Jul 19, 2021

The best teams know where their time is spent and balance efficiently between the most impactful work and housekeeping. It ensures they can reach the high-impact business objectives and solve the right problems in the short term, without compromising the capability to do so over the long term.

Here are some common anti-patterns to observe when it comes to allocating time:

• The majority of your time is spent on bug fixing and maintenance work
• Technical debt is increasing over time, and is not being addressed
• An increasing amount of time is spent working on ad-hoc projects
• Less than 50% of the time is spent on roadmap work

Swarmia’s new investment distribution view gives transparency to the different areas of work teams focus on to help you achieve a balance in how the time is spent.

Use it to see your time allocation by area, and drill down into individual projects to investigate further.

Swarmia completed its latest security audit

Security is an integral part of Swarmia, and since the inception of the product, we’ve been conducting regular security reviews twice a year. In July 2021, we completed our latest security audit and training based on OWASP ASVS 4.0 controls.

Jun 23, 2021

Our goal is to bring transparency and insight into the entire product development process and empower software teams to own their ways of working. When we introduce high-level metrics like cycle time of pull requests and issues, our primary focus is on data quality (see more in our help center). We break high-level metrics into contributing factors allowing teams to investigate their development workflow in greater detail — ultimately, it's all about making insights clear and actionable.

Swarmia’s holistic approach has gotten even more complete with the addition of deployment insights. Now you can see deployment frequency, average deploy time, and deploy success rate in Swarmia.

We use GitHub’s check runs to analyze deployment data. Enable deployment insights by selecting relevant check runs in repository settings in Swarmia.

Performance improvements

We’ve improved the performance of all charts and tables. Now it’s easy to load up to a year’s worth of data on a team's performance — helping to spot trends and outliers that aren’t as clear on shorter timeframes.

More clarity for issue cycle time calculation

You can now see the exact time intervals included in cycle time calculations for all issues: just hover over the time an issue was in progress anywhere in the app.

If an issue was in progress more than once (it happens if it was moved to in progress by accident, or returned to backlog half-done), only relevant time intervals are counted towards the cycle time.

Jun 2, 2021

Measuring and limiting work in progress is at the core of continuous improvement. When a team works on too many things at once, things move slower, affecting the team's ability to deliver value. Introducing work in progress limits helps increase flow, boost focus, and create the slack necessary to plan new work and improve ways of working.

Work in progress can be measured on a few different levels. At Swarmia we visualize what's in progress both for code - pull requests - as well as for issues in progress. Swarmia's Insights show the relationship between work in progress and cycle time, helping teams to arrive at an optimal WIP target and set up a working agreement to spot early signals of WIP increasing.

With the latest update, it's possible to select multiple teams in pull request insights to see how individual teams' WIP and cycle time trends compare to the rest of the organization. In addition, it aims to show if the observed trends are team-specific or reflect the general direction of the organization as a whole.

To access cross-team insights, select more than one team in the dropdown on top. As of now, it's available for PR insights only, but we’re planning to bring the same functionality to issues next.

Other improvements

• We've improved the definition of issue cycle time to account for issues with complex status histories. Previously, if an issue was moved between In Progress and To Do or Done statuses more than once (e.g., if the issue was moved to In Progress, then put on hold for a month, and returned back), cycle time would be the total time from the first time it was moved to In Progress until the last time it was moved to Done. Now cycle time includes only the time the issue has spent in the In Progress status, according to your issue tracker.
• 🎉 Swarmia’s deployment insights are now in alpha! Contact us to get early access.

May 18, 2021

Lately, we’ve been busy improving our pull request insights to help teams explore and understand the raw data behind cycle time, review time, and other metrics. Now we’re bringing the same improvements to issue insights.

Use them to get an overview of cycle times, scope size, and scope creep for all ongoing and completed issues. We've found that even in best-performing teams scope creep is not uncommon, and some variation in scope is totally normal. Yet it's important to look into what makes scope grow (tasks added while you're already working on a feature) to improve the quality of the planning. We've also added a rolling average trendline to all charts to help you follow work in progress and cycle time trends over time.

Next, we’re working on new high-level insights that show trends across all teams in an organization. Let us know if you’re interested in getting early access to try them out.

Other improvements

• We believe data quality is a feature and constantly improve the logic that helps assign contributions to the right people across tools. Now you can see all active contributors in Settings to make sure their work is assigned correctly.
• Fixed a bug where issues moved between Done and In Progress more than once would be shown incorrectly in Swarmia.

Apr 27, 2021

Remember that time when a small and straightforward project ended up taking weeks or even months to complete? We've all have been there. Today we're excited to introduce new tools to help you diagnose flow issues, recognize scope creep signals early on, and improve planning accuracy.

👉 Select an issue in Work Log to see a burn up chart with all tasks added and completed over its lifetime. New tasks added while an issue is in progress count towards estimated scope creep.

Other improvements

• When tracking commits merged to master without review, you can now see the name of the default branch for each commit in the exceptions list, and each repository in repository settings
• Bugs issue type is now available for all working agreements (e.g. Bugs are closed in under 7 days)
• Performance and stability improvements: we fixed some timeouts and "Unexpected token < in JSON" errors that you might have seen lately

Apr 13, 2021

Swarmia’s notifications are designed to help you focus, save time, and enable powerful workflows — like linking pull requests to issues — right in Slack. We care about keeping the noise level to a minimum: if you get a notification from Swarmia, it means an action is required from you.

With the latest update, you have even more granular control over notifications you get from Swarmia. Now you can choose what comments and PR-related updates you want to be notified about.

Other improvements

• You can now edit GitHub, Jira, Linear, Slack data associated with your Swarmia account
• Improved accuracy when calculating cycle time in Pull Request Insights
• All charts under Flow Insights now include rolling average lines
• Improved error handling and stability of the app

Mar 31, 2021

Getting high-quality data about your pull request pipeline is the first step to a better understanding of process changes that improve velocity and quality. Our new pull request insights are here to help. See some key highlights below.

Cycle time average graph (on the right) shows how long it generally takes you to close pull requests, and how the situation develops over time. If you close pull requests timely, it trends down. Pull requests left open for several days result in an upwards trend. Aiming to close all pull requests in under a week (or 1–2 days on average) is a good starting point for uninterrupted delivery.

Pull requests in progress graph (on the left) gives a clue into how your ability to close pull requests is affected by the number of pull requests worked on at once by the team. Working on too many pull requests at once can result in longer delivery times, and we recommend adding a work in progress limit (e.g. up to 7 pull requests open at once) to make sure pull requests piling up don't slow down the team.

➡️ Cycle time distribution chart (on the right) shows what portion of pull requests takes longer than expected to complete, and individual pull requests are shown in the scatter plot on the left. Pull requests far above the rolling average line need special attention — it’s the code that’s been waiting for the longest to be delivered.

Filter the pull request table by status, repository, or author (by clicking the filter icon in the table header) to identify problematic pull requests. Filters apply to the table as well as the charts above.

Review time is another important contributing factor to cycle time. Sorting the table by review time helps to identify pull requests that have spent the longest in review — or have been merged without review at all. The number of pull requests merged without review is reflected in the review rate above the charts.

Other improvements

Tasks completed with no coding activity are now shown at the bottom of Work Log making it easier to see where the engineering team’s focus has been week to week.

Mar 17, 2021

Old open pull requests can make pull request cycle time metrics difficult to interpret. Our new pull request archive gives you the option to hide old and stale pull requests in Swarmia. This is especially useful for you to start focusing on improving ways of working when adopting Swarmia without letting the burden of the past get in your way.

If your team has pull requests with no activity since the last 30 days Swarmia prompts you the option to archive them on the Pull Request view.

Archived pull requests are excluded from all metrics in Swarmia and Slack daily digest. After archiving, you can still browse them on the Pull Request view.

Self-signup available

Your colleagues can now sign up to Swarmia directly from our website. Based on the new user's GitHub account details, we can identify and link the user to your organization in Swarmia. In addition to providing a self-signup option, you'll still have the option to share an invite link (available on the app front page) with your colleagues.

Mar 2, 2021

Code review helps ensure code quality, and share knowledge within the team. Yet even among teams performing code reviews regularly, pushing unreviewed code to master is not uncommon. Our new working agreement helps track all commits merged to your main branch without review, and start a conversation within the team if it becomes an issue.

See how your team is doing under Explore → We don’t push code directly to main branch. Connect Swarmia’s Slack digest to get a daily summary of all unreviewed code pushed to production.

Select what teams to see in Swarmia

Now you can choose GitHub teams to show in Swarmia, and hide teams that do not represent actual development teams in your organisation: for example, if you use teams for access control. We’ve hidden some of these teams automatically based on Swarmia usage. 👉 See them all here.

Other improvements

• Pull request dots in all scatter plots now link to GitHub
• Better auto-complete suggestions when searching for projects in Jira configuration settings
• Switching the team now preserves the selected working agreement

Feb 16, 2021

We continue to invest in automated tools for categorizing work. Now you can link pull requests to investment categories automatically by adding a rule to auto-assign work to categories based on PR titles.

Improvements to the invitation process

Inviting team members to Swarmia is now easier. If they are part of your GitHub organization, they'll be able to log in to Swarmia without an invitation link.

Swarmia is not affected by the Log4j vulnerability

We also wanted to let you know that the recently discovered Apache Log4j Security vulnerability does not affect our services. Swarmia doesn't run Java software on its servers. Nonetheless, we conducted an internal security investigation over the weekend to confirm our systems are operating securely.

Feb 15, 2021

A software team’s velocity is a combination of many factors. Looking into pull request pipeline by stage is a great starting point to identify bottlenecks and get pull requests through faster. With the new cycle time breakdown it is easy to see whether review, merge, or WIP time takes longer than expected.

You can also use Swarmia’s filters to look at cycle time and throughput metrics for bot-created, cross-team, and other PRs separately.

The chart below cycle time shows how your pull request queue trends over time. When multiple pull requests are left open for long, it trends up. When pull requests are merged timely, it trends down. Many teams will notice that Christmas bump on longer timeframes where cycle time increases during holiday time 🎅.

Pull request age now includes the time since the first commit

Previously, pull request age was calculated from the moment a pull request was created, and earlier commits would not get reflected in cycle time insights. Including time since the first commit allows better comparison between pull requests and makes pull request insights more accurate.

Other improvements

• Throughput (pull requests merged per day) chart got updated, and now includes the total number of pull requests merged in the selected timeframe in addition to the daily average.
• Cycle time and throughput metrics now include a comparison to the previous time period

Feb 2, 2021

Our goal at Swarmia is to help teams to get a holistic picture of where their time goes, improve flow and make better planning decisions.

Using Work Log is an excellent way to keep track of day-to-day work and spot patterns like siloing, reactive works, and multi-tasking early on.

With the new high-level Work Log, it’s easy to zoom out and see everything you worked on over the past year. Use it to diagnose flow interruptions, spot never-ending projects, and prepare for team retrospectives.

It’s also a great tool to see just how much you got done and celebrate your progress with the team 🥳.

Working agreement to help you link pull requests to issues

Knowing where the time goes starts with bringing together the data from where work happens. Linking pull requests to issues is a great starting point. It enables better Work Log insights and helps the team to have more informed conversations about how to organize the work.

Add the new working agreement to see how many PRs you link, and don’t forget to enable personal notifications to get timely nudges in Slack when an unlinked PR is merged.

Other improvements

• Now you can see all PRs where you were mentioned in 💬 Participating tab in PR overview
• Fixed an issue where some at-mention notifications would not be delivered
• Stability improvements

Jan 12, 2021

Sometimes a PR in review might get a lot of comments, but they're all just observations. Now you can immediately tell from the Slack notification if your PR is good to go or has anything left to improve. Configure personal notifications here.

Don’t miss new comments in PR review threads you respond to

In a well-functioning team, PR reviews move forward fast, and resolving issues highlighted in review is a priority. Now, as you reply to a PR review thread, you will get notified about all new comments until the thread is resolved.

Bot PRs get a new home

Following up on the latest updates to the PR overview helping you manage your team’s PR inbox, we’ve added a new section for bot-created PRs.

For all bot users in your GitHub organization, you should be able to see their contributions in Swarmia already. You can also assign bots manually in contributor settings.

Other improvements

• Swarmia holds internal security reviews, and a staff security training every six months. Latest review took place in December 2020.
• You can now get Swarmia team updates & daily digest not only in public but also in private Slack channels. Use our guide to get started.
• Now you can see the weekly number of bug fixes in Work Log.
• PRs labeled as bugs now appear in the bugs lane in Work Log even if not linked to an issue.

Dec 8, 2020

Swarmia continues to build tools that surface the otherwise invisible work in software teams and help you get a clear picture of your pull requests inbox. Now we’re adding new essential filters providing an at-a-glance overview of all pull requests in both personal and team context:

• Unlinked. Pull requests that are not linked to an issue.
• Participating. Pull requests where you are a reviewer, author, or commenter.
• From other teams. Pull requests created by other teams, and assigned to your team to review.
• 24h stale and over 7 days old. Best kept empty.

Soon, bot-created pull requests are getting a new home too. Contact us for more details.

Other improvements

• Fixed an issue where some mentions wouldn’t be delivered via Slack. Another great reason to enable our personal reminders.
• Fixed an issue where some stale pull requests would show up twice in pull request overview.
• Improved error handling across the application.
• Improved organization onboarding.

Nov 23, 2020

Working agreements are a powerful tool teams use to adopt and keep track of better working habits. Every once in a while, an exception to the rule occurs, and Swarmia already helps you to review those old PRs or a never-ending story that escaped your agreements in the recent past.

Now it’s even easier to prevent future exceptions as you can keep track of all that escapes your agreements ⏰ right now. Aim for inbox zero, and review your agreements with the team frequently to make sure the new habits stick.

Working agreements work best with the daily digest. Once an agreement is adopted, it appears in the digest with a link to all active exceptions.

Improved pull requests overview

Keeping pull requests inbox in order is the foundation of a healthy software team. With the updated pull requests overview, it's easy to see all work in progress at a glance:

• Pull requests are divided into groups: ready to merge, waiting for review, and in progress. It's clear what action is required next.
• Pull requests with no activity for over 24 hours are labeled Stale. Take care of these first.
• See review status, all contributors (authors, reviewers & commenters), comments, and CI build status for each PR.

This update is part of a series that makes Swarmia your go-to place for everything PR-related. Coming next:

• Filter for stale, old, unlinked pull requests
• All pull requests where you participate (as an author, reviewer or commenter) in one place
• Pull requests from other teams, assigned to your team for review

Share your feedback and suggestions at hello@swarmia.com, or using the chat button anywhere in the app.

Other improvements

• Team selection is now preserved in the URL. Now it's easy to bookmark and share Swarmia pages of the teams you follow.
• Improved handling of commenting bots, more bots are excluded from the pull requests overview + Swarmia notifications
• Now pull requests are labeled Stale in the daily digest only after 24 hours of no activity
• Added support for canceled and archived Linear projects
• Improved accuracy when calculating issue lifetime in the Work Log

Nov 9, 2020

Making a long-lasting improvement to working habits is impossible without a strong feedback loop. With that in mind, we've built our Daily Digest — a Slack update aligned with your daily stand-up meeting that provides a brief summary of pull requests, issues, and working agreements that need your team's attention, while keeping the noise level to a minimum.

Now it's even more actionable and concise:

• Take action: see pull requests waiting for review & ready for merge
• Draft, in-progress, as well as closed PRs, are not shown
• Stale and Old pull requests are highlighted
• See the number of open vs. completed tasks for issues in progress

Set up your digest in Settings. Make sure to select your team's main Slack channel for better visibility. We're eager to hear your feedback, feel free to send us a message using the chat bubble in the bottom right corner of the app.

Other improvements

• Weekends are now excluded for pull requests marked as Stale in the Daily Digest
• Pull request review time chart now shows the target you have chosen when setting up a new working agreement
• Contributor management improvements
• Improvements to y-axis labels for review time chart

Nov 2, 2020

See all completed, in progress, and to-do subtasks in a progress bar below each issue in Work Log. Now it easier to stay up to date with the issue scope, and status of subtasks in your projects.

Issue lifetime contributors

We continue adding improvements to Work Log that give you a broader context to issue activity. Now we show everyone who has worked on an issue over its lifetime, with recent contributors highlighted.

Other improvements

• Working agreements preview now updates live when configuring a new agreement
• Improved error handling, now it is less common for entire pages to fail with an error
• Deleted GitHub teams are not visible in Swarmia anymore, but historical data in all charts is preserved.
• Subtask icons are now shown in the Work Log
• Swarmia Slack bot now posts issue linking confirmation comments to all pull requests

Oct 12, 2020

Swarmia’s Insights already help you keep track of your pull request and issue cycle times, and we also let you set targets for Pull Request cycle time with a Working Agreement. This week, we’re releasing new features that help you drill down to the Pull Request review time, and to set targets for Issue cycle times.

Pull request review time

Making sure that code is reviewed without delay is one of the most important things you can do to improve team dynamics and throughput. Our new Insight and Working Agreement lets teams specifically improve the time it takes to review code. The time to review code is a leading indicator of the pull requests' total cycle time, and counting working days only lets the team set aggressive goals for this crucial step.

A new scatterplot in Pull Request Flow Insights shows how long it takes to provide a review after one is requested. To help organizations dealing with delays caused by cross-team dependencies, reviews provided by other teams are highlighted in a different color.

The corresponding Working Agreement helps your team step up your Pull Request review game by setting a target for how many working days Pull Requests wait for review.

As with other Working Agreements, details about exceptions help your team troubleshoot your process in retrospective meetings, and instant feedback in the daily Slack digest helps you address issues with Pull Requests reviews as they occur.

You can read more about why and how to review code faster in our Support Article.

Manage issue cycle time

Most teams have a rough idea of how long it should take to finish an Epic, Story or Task, but it’s common for progress on Issues to stall for a multitude of reasons. Our new Working Agreement helps teams manage cycle time by setting targets in calendar days and highlighting exceptions.

In addition to the Working Agreement page and the daily Slack digest, issues that are taking too long are highlighted in Work Log to help teams analyze exceptions in context.

Other improvements

• In addition to Work Log, the Issue Activity popup can now be opened by clicking an issue in Flow Insights
• Improvements to Insights visualizations, including separately showing the median
• Small fixes to how Pull Request categories are displayed in Work Log

Oct 9, 2020

Swarmia’s Working Agreements have already been helping teams when it comes to managing work in progress and cycle time. Many teams have found them especially useful to manage issue workload, and to get notified when issues are taking too long. However, a limitation so far has been the ability to only create working agreements about one issue type.

Add Another Working Agreement

Managing the amount of work in progress is one of the most effective ways for a team to maintain focus and deliver tasks quickly. Imposing work-in-progress limits for Stories has been an important tool for teams struggling with too much work, but this has precluded setting similar limits for Epics, Tasks, or Bugs. At the same time, most teams have an idea about how long different tasks should take. For example, Stories should usually be completed within a week or two, whereas Tasks can be significantly shorter, and Epics significantly longer.

Swarmia now allows teams to adopt multiple copies of issue related Working Agreements. For example, teams can impose work-in-progress limits for both Stories and Epics, and also manage the cycle times of both issue types. If you’ve already adopted Working Agreements about the number of Stories open at once, or targets for closing Stories, navigate to theExplore tab in Working Agreements, select either working agreement, create a new configuration, and click Adopt another.

In this case, a team that has already agreed to have a maximum of three Stories open at once can adopt another Working Agreement, this time limiting the number of Epics open at once to one. Adopting multiple, identical Working Agreements is of course not supported or useful. Adding multiple copies of Pull Request related Working Agreements is also not supported.

Pull Request Review Distribution

Our new Insights about Pull Request review times have been useful for teams with delays in this crucial step. Most teams are mostly alright in terms of review times, with significant outliers causing problems. To help teams understand the magnitude of issues with Pull Request review, we’ve added a new histogram that shows the distribution of review times, and we also now spell out the median review times separately for all issues, issues reviewed by the team itself, and issues reviewed by other teams.

Other improvements

• Small UI improvements to charts in Working Agreements
• Tooltips in Pull Request Insights show contributor avatars and review conclusion
• Charts in Working Agreements show the limit line instead of the median
• Small fixes to how we calculate unplanned work in Work Log

Oct 5, 2020

Linking pull requests to issues from your issue tracker is the best way to keep tabs on your team’s focus and flow using Work Log. But when teams self-organize around caring for a codebase, it’s just natural that not all pull requests can be linked to an issue.

Pull request categories

It’s great when teams take ownership of their code and deal with small bugs, chores and improvements right away, but it’s still useful to understand where the team’s efforts are spent. This week we’re introducing a powerful new feature to categorize Pull Requests without linking them to issues.

Previously, all unlinked Pull Requests were plotted on the Uncategorized row in Work Log, with no quick way to identify what kind of work it was. The new Pull Request Categories feature lets you assign unlinked pull requests to one of four categories: Bug, Improvement, Chore, or Refactoring.

Unlinked Pull Requests can be assigned to a category by selecting it in the familiar dropdown menu in the Pull Request view.

As usual, we notify you on Slack when merging an unlinked Pull Request. Now you have the option to click a button labeled "It’s something else" and select a category:

As a result, Work Log shows a much more accurate view of where the team spends its focus. Unlinked Pull Requests assigned to the Bug category are plotted right on the Bugs swimlane, and the newly renamed Unplanned swimlane shows a breakdown of the week’s unlinked Pull Requests by category.

Other improvements

• Fixes to calendar rendering in Issue Insights when an issue has been open for a very long time
• Stopped sending Slack messages about edited pull request comments
• Fixed small issues with handling GitHub Check Runs
• Performance improvements to Continuous Integration Insights
• Pull Request comment about issue linking now shows the full issue hierarchy

Sep 28, 2020

Work Log already helps you visualize where your team’s focus is spent on a weekly basis and to identify common patterns having to do with team dynamics and focus. The all-new Issue Insights feature lets you drill down deeper on an individual Epic, Story, Task or Bug to find out how your team organizes around issues, and what you could do to increase focus and accelerate delivery.

Drill down on issue flow

Navigate to Work Log and click on an issue. This opens the Issue Insights popup that shows a number of key facts.

Open days is the number of calendar days since the first linked GitHub activity, or since the issue was marked In Progress. Active days is the total number of days with activity linked to the issue. Efficiency is the ratio of Active days to business days.

The calendar shows the intensity of activity linked to the issue per day: the darker the shade of blue, the more activity on that day. To take a closer look at what your team was working on in a given week, clicking a week in the calendar takes you to that week in Work Log.

Focus matters

Ideally, we want to see long streaks of dark blue in the calendar. Teams that put in big chunks of focused work tend to finish fast, even if efficiency is under 100% — short interruptions like vacation days and urgent bugs are hard to avoid completely.

Often the reality is that team focus is stretched too thin. Even with 100% efficiency, progress can be slower than necessary if contributors are working alone or there are many concurrent topics competing for the team’s attention. This is evident in the issue insights calendar when progress is steady, but most days are a lighter shade of blue.

Unfortunately, it’s all too common for teams to be inundated with work in progress and constant interruptions. Slow progress with lots of waiting is clearly visible in the issue insights calendar with long periods of grey inactivity interspersed by light-blue days here and there.

How is your team doing? Head over to{' '} Work Log and click on some issues to find out!

Issue link in pull request comments

To get the full benefits of Swarmia’s Work Log and the new Issue Insights, it’s important to get into the habit of linking Pull Requests to Jira issues. Swarmia now posts a comment in each linked Pull Request to confirm that it’s been linked, as well as to help you quickly check the respective Jira issue for scope, designs and other context by following the link in the comment.

New issue tracker: Linear

In addition to Jira, most Swarmia features are available now for Linear users as well. Link Pull Requests, view Work Log by Linear project or issue, and view Insights about Linear projects and issues. Let us know if you’re using Linear and would like to look beyond pull requests with Swarmia!

Small improvements

• Lots of small optimizations amounting to a significant performance boost
• Cycle time metric now includes merged pull requests only
• Slack notifications are sent about @mentions in GitHub comments
• Lots of small UI tweaks and bugfixes to improve usability

Aug 5, 2020

We believe in self-organizing teams that own their ways of working. With Swarmia, teams already get full visibility into their process and can identify potential improvements — but transparency alone is not enough to become better and stronger as a team. Working Agreements is a powerful new feature that helps teams continuously improve with clear goals and consistent execution. Our first iteration includes features to manage the amount of work in progress and the cycle time of Pull Requests.

Manage Work in Progress and Cycle Time

Managing the amount of work in progress and reviewing code without delay are some of the best ways for teams to improve their speed and focus. Our first Working Agreements allow teams to set work-in-progress limits for issues and Pull Requests, and to set a limit for Pull Request age.

Ready to jump in? Why not have a conversation with your team and head over to the new Working Agreements area in the app to get started.

Working Agreements are simple to configure and adopt, and insights about the Working Agreement as well as details about recent exceptions are clearly visible in the UI.

Finally, the daily Slack notification shows how the team is doing with their Working Agreements, helping teams adopt new habits with immediate feedback. If you haven't enabled Slack notifications for your team yet, now is a good time to do it.

What Working Agreements does your team use, or would find useful? We have lots of ideas about what to do next, but we'd like to hear from you.

Other improvements

• Cycle Time graph in the Pull Requests view updated to scatterplot
• Continuing to adopt our new design in frontend
• Performance improvements

Jul 13, 2020

As mentioned in the previous feature update, managing the amount of work in progress is a great way to get work done faster.

New cycle time insights plots completed issues on a timeline and shows how long they were open. The scatter plot makes it easy to identify outliers and trends, and drill down on individual issues.

Can you find correlations between the amount of work in progress and cycle time for your team?

Other improvements

• Significant Work Log performance boost
• Usability improvements to tooltips in Insights
• Improved color palette for data visualizations
• Numerous small usability and UI improvements

Jun 15, 2020

We continue to work on the Insights product area. This week we are adding Quality Insights to help teams stay on top of their Continuous Integration pipelines, and working on all new Insights about flow.

Quality insights: build time

In addition to flaky builds, Continuous Integration Insights has a new tab that plots build times on a timeline. Drill down to a given day to see the average build runtimes and the number of builds.

Coming soon: Controlling the amount of unfinished work is a great way to stay focused and improve flow. Find out next week how we can help teams locate bottlenecks and understand how much work they have on their plate!

Other improvements

• Small usability improvements in Work Log
• Improved database and app performance
• UI tweaks and small bugfixes to Quality Insights
• Usability improvements in Team and GitHub Settings

Jun 12, 2020

Managing the amount of work in progress is one of the best ways for a team to improve focus and get work done faster.

Flow Insights plots the number of open Pull Requests, Epics, Stories and Tasks on a timeline, helping teams understand how much work they have on their plate at a given time.

Lots of Work in Progress usually correlates with longer cycle time and intermittent progress, which is something you can identify in Work Log. What correlations can you find?

Other improvements

• Usability improvements/fixes in personal and Slack settings
• Improvements and bugfixes to Insights charts and tooltips

Jun 8, 2020

We're starting to develop a new product area called Insights to help teams form a holistic view of their ways of working. The first Insights are about quality: bugs and continuous integration.

Introducing quality insights

Bug Insights shows the volume of bugs on a timeline and how many bugs you are opening and closing on a daily basis, based on your team's Jira data.

Continuous Integration Insights plots the daily percentage of flaky builds on a timeline. You can drill down to a given day to see how many builds were flaky and how much time was wasted waiting for them to complete.

Next up: build duration. Stay tuned, and don't forget to let us know what you think!

Other improvements

• Work Log shows all issues that your team has worked on even if they are assigned to other teams
• Work Log shows both Tasks and Stories under Other Issues in Epic view
• Usability improvements in Jira Settings for larger organizations