Issue insights

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