The company I work for uses GitHub extensively. Is there is a way to compare my team's individual contributions to specific repositories on a weekly basis?
Apart from loading their individual GitHub profiles and comparing the statistics?
My team is growing at quite a rapid pace, and soon it will be difficult to find the time to manually compare them. We also work in 4 different times zones thus it can be difficult to sync up with everyone effectively.
The current main view which offer user activity comparison is the Graphs view:
(That and the Pulse view)
Related
Our company has recently introduced Azure DevOps to streamline project management process. Currently, 140 projects are created under our organization in Azure DevOps. As and when requirement comes from client for any specific project, we create tasks/bugs for different developers under that project. Currently we use only two Work Item type - Bug and Task.
Now the issue is Management of the company wants to see Project-wise number of "New/Open", "Active" and "Closed" Tasks and Bugs in a SINGLE chart. That means, that single chart must fit consolidated data of 140 projects. If a person views that single chart they must get idea, for example that - Project 1 has 2 new/open work items, 2 active work items and 2 closed Work items , Project 2 has 1 new/open work items, 10 active work items and 3 closed Work items and so on.. This is done so that management in a glance can understand which project is lagging behind for customer delivery. So that they can work accordingly build more manpower for those Projects.
I have tried to create various such charts and widgets with different queries in Azure DevOps. I used widget burn up and burn out charts but it gives data for tasks of single Project only. Also when we add multiple projects to it, it shows summation of completed/remaining tasks for those Projects & NOT Project name-wise completed/remaining tasks bifurcation.
I also tried "Charts for work item" widget but it also fetches count as per- Assignee, State and Work Item type and not project name wise count is fetched.
I don't want to navigate through 140 projects pages to see it's open, active and closed tasks. So please help me out in suggesting the ideas on How can I build a single chart from where we can get all this data? I will be forever grateful for your answers.
Thank you!
You could create a query across projects, select Team Project column in Column option, ad save the query as shared query. Check the screenshots below:
Then add a chart widget to a dashboard, select Pivot table, and set Team Projects, State as Rows and Columns. Check the screenshot below:
You could expand the view to see more details:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/report/dashboards/charts?view=azure-devops#add-a-chart-widget-to-a-dashboard
I'd be slightly careful based on what you've put down because I don't think your management team quite understand what they need, and DevOps can only do so much. I'd be challenging them around the setup of your DevOps process personally because I don't think it's advisable to not have user stories as part of your setup. Although it simplifies some aspects of DevOps, our experience has been that people have been able to group things together better with user stories as well as tasks.
Appreciate it's a good idea to be able to see what's going on across all projects, but I think there are probably further criteria to think about. E.g. do you want to see estimates instead of/as well as the count of the items since that will have a better reflection of the effort required. In terms of completed items and in fact, probably all that you're displaying, again it's more on your project process, but are management genuinely interested in everything? For example, do they need to know that something was closed 6 months ago, or are they just interested in the last month?
I suppose what I'm getting at is you probably need a bit more information from management about what they want to use the report for so you can give them what they need rather than they want. There's a temptation to say you want everything because you don't understand the capabilities of the solution or what you're going to use it for, and my recommendation would be to challenge them on this so you can better present things (giving them what they need rather than what they want).
In terms of what you're looking to do, I'll openly admit I'm not clued up on everything DevOps related but I doubt you'll be able to report at a project level within DevOps. I think what you'd need to do is set up your query, which would look across all projects in your organisation, and then export the results to Excel. From there I'd create a pivot table (or perhaps more than 1) with the data that you need. Have Project names down the left side (row headers), and bring in whatever else you need as columns. I think that's probably a good quick win to get something in front of your management team, and then you could challenge from there - almost picking holes in it so that they realise that the business decisions that they'd make from this may not be fully informed, and suggesting some changes. From experience, it's probably better to consider it almost as a prototype and not get bogged down with a solution at this stage because you may be asked for changes when they can visualise what they've originally asked for. Once management is happy you could look at other solutions to provide the report, but Excel is typically a good starting point I've found in the past when working on something new like this.
In my organization, our Azure DevOps setup has individual projects for individual areas. We have several areas in the 'digital' space and we need to be able to track activity and prioritize across these projects together.
So far we've managed to set up cross-project queries which are working reasonably well, but we want to visualize the work items in a kanban style board.
I've found an extension that shows a query in a board view but it hasn't been updated for some time and doesn't fully solve our issue (it's not listing the cards in priority order). https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=realdolmen.querybasedboards
Is there another option?
Thanks
Callum
(Posting the question here as this is the 'community' that Microsoft redirects to with a 'Need advice? Ask community' button. Hope it won't get closed as 'primarily opinion based' or 'too broad')
Hello,
I want to start using AzureDevops in my department for organizing code & work. We're a small team who creates a large number of applications & plugins.
Some of these applications have a very short lifecycle, i.e. we deliver them, and they work for years without changes. Other apps are larger and are updated/fixed across several months or years.
These applications are completely separate from each other in all aspects.
As far as I understand Azure DevOps structure, my department should become an 'Organization' (we can/need to be separate from the rest of the corporation).
I am a bit puzzled about the 'Project' part. Documentation says
In general, we recommend that you use a single project to support your organization or enterprise.
So, let's say we do have one project called Our Apps - where do we then put all the individual application-projects?
As far as I understand, each product (application) that we deliver should have it's own repository (or a set of applications, if they are logically connected).
This is in order to allow a developer to simply clone the repo on their machine and contribute to that product only - without downloading other projects etc.
I need to be able to:
easily navigate/see all the tens/(hundreds?) of applications that we create,
view their separate kanban boards (for those project that do have it, not all of them will)
to see their repositories (Git or TFS), commits etc
see & manage their pipelines
At the moment it seems to me that the only place where I can see a 'list' of what products do we have is the drop down below:
And the only way to see what is going on in the big-enough-to-get-own-board products is by creating a new separate 'SomeApp Team' in the Project (even though same people are in it), so that I can have a board for the SomeApp - and view the boards from here:
Is that the intended way to organize the structure?
Any alternative approaches?
Is there any way to have a 'cross-reposistory' or 'cross-team' overview?
What about creating documentation for each 'product'?
The "one project to rule them all" was coined by Martin Hinshelwood and his blog post from way-back-when explains the reasons and limitations.
With the introduction of Tagging and filtering on the backlog there is an alternative approach within the one-project setup.
Create team for the real teams you have in your organisation.
Create an area path for each major project/product in the org.
Assign the area paths of the projects to the teams who are working on them. This can change over time.
Optionally tag work items with the major project/product for additional filtering.
This way each team sees a complete view of all the work they can pull from. And they can quickly filter the work by tags to remove items from view when discussing specific projects/products.
Also, when teams change their focus from one product/project to another, you can simply change the assigned areas for that team to update their view.
The Plan View extension provides an additional cross-team view across over all the work. And the Dependency Tracker extension can visualize dependencies over time.
You can also use the Epic/Feature/PBI|UserStory tree structure to create additional grouping in your work items. You can customize the process template to introduce a Product level, though for the planning features to work, that would also mean that you'd also have to create full traceability from Product down to PBI|UserStory.
The main recommendation is to try a few of these approaches in a light-weight manner to see how they work and find your own ideal setup.
Another option for cross project visualization is to enable the Analytics Extension and connect it to PowerBI.
As you'll soon figure out, naming guidelines for your Tags, Repositories, Pipelines is going to be very important. Being able to quickly filter to the right level requires this.
Github provides nice feature to manage feature completeness OR sprint completeness. It's called Milestones and it's really nice.
However, sometimes we need to track both completeness of the feature (e.g. "Refactoring payment systems integration") and completeness of the sprint (e.g. "Sprint week 15").
Is there any way to do so using Github issues?
GitHub does not currently allow you to assign multiple milestones to an issue. There is an issue tracking this feature request, but there seems to be little movement on it.
There's a couple of workarounds possible. The simplest one is to use Milestones to track sprints, and labels to track features. While labels do not give you the nice "X% completed" overview that Milestones do, you can quickly (single click) get an overview of all issues tagged with a label, and see how many are open vs. closed.
Another possibility is that you use Task Lists (see GitHub Markdown guide) to your advantage. Instead of having each issue belonging to a particular feature as an independent GitHub issue, you track the entire feature as a single issue, and add a Task List to the issue to track individual items. The advantage of this is that you get a nice progress bar in your issue overview, showing you feature completeness. A disadvantage is that you cannot assign individual tasks to separate developers any longer.
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We are currently utilising an agile environment in work. One of my tasks involve setting up a release timetable. A part of this is providing a time frame of how long a project would take to go from a development environment, to staging and then live.
I have conflicting thoughts regarding whether such a timetable needs to be done.
For a start, we are quickly moving into a Continuous Integration / Constant Delivery environment where an application is tested amongst all environments when a change is made to the code base. Therefore, there is no time frame, but things should be "just" deployable. (Well, we always need a little bit of contingency as the best laid plans can always go awry)
Can anyone steer my in the right direction on what would be the best way to handle such time tables and timeframes if needed in Release Management in an Agile Product Development Environment.
Regards,
Steve
Can anyone steer my in the right direction on what would be the best way to handle such time tables and timeframes if needed in Release Management in an Agile Product Development Environment.
First of all the Scrum Framework guidelines never guides you to not have a Release Plan or Time table ever. What is leading you to have conflicting thoughts? I would like to know the source which is leading you to this conflict.
Best way to create a Release Plan is like this (this may take a week or so depending on the size of your project):
Get the Stakeholders in a room and get a EPIC user story written on the board using their guidance. The EPIC user story should include the end product vision. (ignore if already done)
List out the type of users.(ignore if already done)
Break the Epic user story into smaller and smaller chunks of user stories till they are small enough to be doable in sprints.(ignore if already done)
Ask the Product Owner(s) of the Scrum Team(s) to prioritize the stories in the uncommitted backlog list(s) Also do some form of effort estimation fairly quickly and do not waste a lot of time estimating.
Get the target end date or Go Live date of the project from Stakeholders.
Divide the time frame from now until the end date into Releases. Ask the stakeholders which features need to be delivered by when and include the appropriate user stories in them, and call them Releases. You can also give those Releases themes if needed.
The Release Plan now is conceptualized.
After this draw it on a white board or put it in a visible and transparent location where everyone can see it - add user story cards to the appropriate release.
Now your initial release plan should be ready
Ideas for implementation:
Form a Scrum Team specifically for Operations Activities. They could follow Scrum or Kanban would be better.
As and when Development teams get "shippable products" put in the shelf, the Operations Kanaban Team can do the deployment and release branching etc tasks as per the Release Plan.
So this way the development Teams don't really focus on the Release plan or work, just the Operations Team does that. The Development Team just focussed on the Sprint Work, it would be the Product Owners headache to make sure the right user stories are in the right Release and in the right order. The direction would be given by the Stakeholders.
To be honest you really don't have to do anything yourself, it's all in the stakeholders and POs hand, I don't know where is is the fuss??
I hope you get the picture.
I usually maintain a release plan for the management that is mainly based on a combination of the estimated & prioritized user stories (I group them to match a main new feature of the product) and velocity.
With a well maintained product backlog it's pretty easy to do your release plan. I usually plan three to four releases a year.
What I like with Scrum is that I can potentially release after each iterations.
If you want to master your release management, you will need more information that few answers of practionners. I highly suggest you this book.
If you currently utilising and agile environment you should check Agile estimating and Planning book for some suggestions. This book also contains small chapter about Release planning.
Some release planning should be always done. Release is a target wich usually covers 3-12 months of development = set of iterations. It something which describes target criteria for project to success. It is usually described as combination of expected features and some date. Features in this case are usually not directly user stories but epics or whole themes because you don't know all user stories several months ahead. Personally, I think release is something that says when the project based on vision can be delivered. It takes high level expectations and constraints from the vision and converts them to some estimation. You can also divide project to several releases.
But remember that three forces works in agile as well. There is direct relation among Feature set, Release date and Resources (+ sometimes also mentioned fourth force: Quality). Pushing one of these forces always move others. It is usually modelled as equilateral triangle (or square).
There are different approaches to plan a release. One is mentioned in the book. It is based on user stories estimation, iteration length selection and velocity estimation but I'm little bit sceptic to this approach because you don't have simple user stories for whole release and estimating epics and themes is inaccurate. On the other hand high level feature definition is exactly what you need for three forces. If you don't have enough time you will implement only basic features from all themes. If you have more time you will implement more advanced features. This is task for product owner to correctly set business priority when dividing epics and themes into small user stories.
The most important part in agile is that you will know more quite soon. After each iteration you will have better knowledge of your velocity and you will also reestimate some planned user stories. For this reason I think the real estimate (accurate) and realease date should be planned after few iterations. As I was told on one training effort should not be estimated, effort should be measured. If anybody complains about it show him Waterfall and ask him when will he get relatively accurate estimate? Hint: Hardly before end of analysis wich should be say after 30% of the project.
It is also important what type of projects do you want to implement using agile / scrum and how long will project be. Some projects are strictly budget or date driven others can be more feature driven. This can affect your release planning. For short projects you usually have small user stories and you can provide much more accurate estimate at the beginning.
This is a very loaded question, and depends on your company to be sure. I first have to ask, why are you using 3 environments and continuous integration (your reason matters)? Are you performing automated tests at all? How are your code branches setup? Do you release for some functionality, or just routine maintenance fixes?
Answering these will give you an idea of why you need a release, and how you should go about it.
For example, if you only have a staging environment for the purpose of integration and perform automated tests, then can't having a separate code branch in which continuous integration tests run be sufficient?
If staging is to perform some sort of user acceptance, does your company have a dedicated testing team or are they members of the agile teams?
As you correctly stated, if the code is always integrated and tested, then why would you need a timetable and moving from environment to environment unless you were unsure about the actual "done" condition of the features? By that, I mean that it's not that you're unsure that the feature was coded correctly, but are you worried it will introduce other bugs? Will it integrate well with code already in production? Address the concerns at the root of the problem. Don't just do it because you think you're supposed to have X environments or testing should be in another group. Maybe the solutions to those problems may be to adjust the definition of "done" accordingly.
As you can see there are many, many factors that will make your organization unique. There is no one right way to answer this, just tradeoffs that you are willing to accept.
I find that having multiple environments with teams of people working at the various layers tends to be anti-agile and counterproductive. The best bet is to analyze your concerns, and try to find ways to solve them (such as expanding the definition of "done", or breaking up the various organizations and putting them on the teams, eliminating as many environments as possible and simplifying the process, etc). That may not be possible in your organization, so you may have to live with tradeoffs.