New cross-team insights

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.