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Tag: Jellyfish

  • Jellyfish Adds Tool to Visualize Software Development Workflows

    Jellyfish Adds Tool to Visualize Software Development Workflows

    Jellyfish today unveiled a tool that identifies bottlenecks in software engineering processes using data the company collects via Git repositories and project management software from Atlassian.

    Krishna Kannan, head of product for Jellyfish, said Life Cycle Explorer provides managers with a tool that makes it simpler to identify the root cause of a process breakdown.

    Life Cycle Explorer goes beyond providing simple top-level metrics to calculate the time consumed at each stage of a workflow for any given process and then visually map it to surface trends, noted Kannan.

    That makes it possible to identify gaps, see where work areas overlap—indicating parallel processes—and drill into how outlier events may be impacting the overall life cycle of a development project.

    The launch of Life Cycle Explorer comes at a time when there is more focus on the efficiency of DevOps teams than at any time in recent memory. During uncertain economic times, organizations of all sizes are looking to optimize DevOps workflows to ensure maximum efficiency because many organizations are hesitant to hire additional full-time engineers.

    The important thing to remember when analyzing DevOps workflows is there is no such thing as the optimal “Goldilocks” workflow that can be universally applied, noted Kannan. Instead, most DevOps leaders will discover one team excels at one segment of a DevOps workflow while others are more efficient elsewhere. Life Cycle Explorer makes it easier to identify those best practices in a way that makes them simpler to replicate when appropriate, said Kannan.

    Life Cycle Explorer follows the addition of a benchmarking tool and DevFinOps offering that addresses cost capitalization reporting for research and development. The core Jellyfish engineering management platform is designed to ingest data from the tools an organization already uses to build applications and then applies proprietary algorithms to create a comprehensive view of workflows across an organization. The challenge many organizations encounter today is they often lack visibility into workflows that have each been individually constructed by a diverse range of DevOps teams working on very different types of software projects.

    At the very least, DevOps teams need to establish a baseline that surfaces the current rate at which software development occurs. Once that baseline is established it then becomes possible to measure the impact changes to software engineering practices are having. Today many organizations make educated guesses about what changes are needed without really understanding the impact they might be having across the entire software development life cycle.

    Of course, it will be up to each organization to determine the degree to which they want to measure workflows. The Jellyfish platform makes it simpler to identify workflow issues, but there are also value stream management (VSM) platforms that track the impact software engineering workflows are having on specific business goals. Those VSM platforms are typically much more challenging to implement and maintain. The Jellyfish approach focuses more narrowly on improving the efficiency of DevOps teams.

    Regardless of approach, things that are not measured are not being managed. At a time when organizations are more dependent on software than ever, the need to manage software development life cycle as efficiently as possible has become a lot more important.

  • Jellyfish Launches Industry’s First Comparative Benchmarking Tool for Engineering Leaders

    Jellyfish Benchmarks Adds Anonymized Third-Party Performance Data; Allows Engineering Leaders to Set Productivity Goals Informed by Insights into Cross-Industry Standards of Excellence

    Boston, MA, May 18, 2022 — Jellyfish, the pioneer of Engineering Management Platforms (EMPs), today announced the launch of Jellyfish Benchmarks, a way to add context around engineering metrics and performance by introducing a method for comparison. With the industry’s only in-app benchmarking capability, Jellyfish customers can now understand how they stack up against peers on a percentile basis across numerous metrics on the organization, division, group or team level.  

    Despite having more access than ever to engineering data, the complex nature of modern software engineering means that strategic decisions can lack proper context. Engineering teams may be performing well historically, but without a threshold to compare against — one that represents the very best engineering team across different industries — engineering leaders lack insight into whether their decisions are enabling their organization to achieve elite performance. Jellyfish Benchmarks solve this problem by providing customers with means for comparison from anonymized cross-industry datasets.

    “At Jellyfish, our longstanding goal has been to support customers in building the highest-performing engineering teams possible,” said Andrew Lau, CEO of Jellyfish. “Today, we achieved yet another milestone by offering engineering leaders a trustworthy and expansive set of benchmarks derived from Jellyfish’s unrivaled customer base, providing the most comprehensive thresholds to measure against in the engineering industry.”

    Metrics-Based Engineering Management Is Here

    Engineering teams who opt in will have their data anonymized and added to the benchmarking Jellyfish customer pool. For every metric defined as important to an engineering organization, customers can access a visualization comparing their performance on a percentile basis for a given metric in comparison to their peers or against their own organization — truly an industry first. 

    Among the key metrics being announced with Jellyfish Benchmarks are those focused on allocation, delivery, productivity, collaboration – including key metrics within the DevOps methodology. Allocation benchmarks allow teams to understand how their resource investments compare to other engineering organizations. Delivery can be benchmarked using metrics such as cycle time, productivity using metrics like issues resolved, and collaboration using metrics such as PR reviews. New benchmarking capabilities also enable DevOps teams to track against the DORA metrics – including deployment frequency, lead time, mean time to recovery, and change failure rate.

    “At Acoustic, our number one goal is to do what we say we will do. We measure progress consistently across our engineering team,” said John Riewerts, senior vice president of engineering, Acoustic. “With Jellyfish’s Engineering Management Platform in place, we are now completing nearly all of our commitments in an agile culture. We’ve seen a 35% increase in our ability to do so. The Benchmarks feature gives us a consistent barometer to gauge our performance against teams in other industries, bringing a more game-like approach to our culture. This culture is massive from a productivity perspective, enabling us to meet marketers’ needs as they orchestrate journeys with highly personalized content with highly performant teams, and Jellyfish is critical to getting us to that point.” 

    “By offering the industry’s only in-app benchmarking, Jellyfish is empowering engineering leaders to use context driven by data to examine the efficacy of their engineering strategy and their team’s operations,” said Krishna Kannan, head of product at Jellyfish. “Jellyfish Benchmarks is available for every metric tracked across teams or the entire organization, helping customers understand how their company compares for the metrics that matter most to their engineering function.” 

    Jellyfish Benchmarks also provide data-driven insights with which to inform and influence non-engineering executives, and thus drive better strategic decisions and more closely align engineering with the wider business. The announcement of Jellyfish Benchmarks enhances the Jellyfish EMP’s current capabilities to measure engineering alignment against strategic business priorities and the performance and operations of engineering teams.

    To learn more about Jellyfish Benchmarks, watch the video demo or visit the Jellyfish website. 

    For press inquiries, please contact jellyfish@batemanagency.com.

    About Jellyfish
    Jellyfish is the pioneer Engineering Management Platform that enables engineering leaders to align engineering work with strategic business objectives. By analyzing engineering signals and contextual business data, Jellyfish provides complete visibility into engineering organizations, the work they do, and how they operate. Companies like Mastercard, Priceline, Zoominfo, and Pagerduty use Jellyfish to optimize the allocation of engineering resources to focus their teams on what matters most to the business. For more information, visit www.jellyfish.co

  • Report Finds Software Engineering Productivity Gains

    Report Finds Software Engineering Productivity Gains

    An analysis of the time 23,000 software engineers spent working in 2021 that was published this week by Jellyfish, a provider of an engineering management platform (EMP), finds cycle times on average were down to 12.6 days, representing a 12.3% decline over 2020. The report, however, also finds commits were down 4% year-over-year, while the number of issues resolved was up 5% year over year.

    Jellyfish CEO Andrew Lau said the data suggests that software engineers are opting to commit less code in favor of resolving issues faster. Overall, coding days per engineer were down 8% to less than 1.6 days per week in 2021, the report found.

    Engineering teams on average in 2021 allocated 35% of their time to growth and innovation, while 19% was allocated to infrastructure work, up nearly 6% from 2020. Time spent on support work (24%), meanwhile, was down nearly 5% year over year. On average, unplanned work accounted for 22% of the time software engineers spent working in 2021, a 3% increase over the prior year. In general, Lau said the report suggests that engineering teams need to factor more time into schedules for unplanned work as application environments become more complex.

    The report also finds engineering organizations using EMPs tend to allocate similar time to “keeping the lights on” and customer support activities as other organizations but spend 29% more time on innovation work and 48% less time on unplanned work. In addition, the report notes teams that devote 50% or more resources to growth and innovation work deliver software at least three times faster than those who commit 25% or less.

    Virtual collaboration in the last year has also increased more than 20% as teams continue to embrace remote and hybrid work models, according to the report. Overall, organizations that allow software engineers to work from home remain productive but it’s not quite clear if managers have completely adjusted to the realities of hybrid work, noted Lau. The report also noted that pull request reviews per engineer are up 30% on average to 1.7 reviews per week. Pull review comments per engineer were up 23% year over year.

    In addition to the report, Jellyfish conducted a survey of 128 engineering leaders that finds more than 79% expect to grow their teams in 2022, with 57% expecting more than 10% headcount growth. Improving operations, tooling and processes (36%) is their highest priority in 2022, followed by hiring and retaining talent (18%), improving infrastructure (17%) and managing technical debt (10%). The biggest overall challenge is making sure everyone is focused on the highest priority work (45%), the survey finds.

    However, only 27% of the leaders currently track productivity metrics, despite more than two-thirds (67%) describing them as being very important or critical to track. Among teams that do track metrics, more than half (53%) do so manually, the survey finds.

    While the productivity of software engineers will naturally vary by organization, it’s apparent the weight of application environments is starting to impact how much time can be devoted to building and deploying new applications. The challenge, of course, is demand for new applications in the age of digital transformation has never been higher, which in part explains why so many organizations are struggling to find and retain software engineers.