Chances are you've felt pain around deploying changes to production. Deployments cause stress and anxiety for everyone involved, especially when they happen infrequently. 

Today, we’re releasing Ready to Deploy — a feature that provides visibility into apps with a backlog of changes waiting to be deployed. We built this feature to help ease deployment pain for engineering teams. You can see all of your team’s merged pull requests, organized by repository and sorted by how long they’ve been awaiting deployment.

✨  What’s new?

• Undeployed PRs: see the number of pull requests ready to deploy for your team.
• Merge to deploy: see which repositories have the longest average time between merging and deploying pull requests.
• Time to deploy goal: set a goal for time to deploy to prevent changes from piling up right before pushing to production.
• Visibility from open to deploy: track work in progress all the way from code review (using the Open Pull Requests view) to deployment (using the Ready to Deploy view).
• Advanced filters: filters allow you to change the data range and choose whether to include or exclude pull requests created by bots (e.g. Dependabot).

💭 How does it work?

1. Go to our Ready to Deploy feature to see your data. It works out-of-the-box with our existing GitHub integration if you’re using GitHub Actions, deployments, or releases.
2. We automatically detect how you deploy each repository, but you can also manually assign specific workflow runs, check runs, deployments, and releases as production deployments for each repository.

👋   Latest from the community

• Omar Bahareth, CTO at Ejaro, wrote Engineering Management: An Overview, a deep dive into the most important responsibilities of engineering managers.

Our team aims to make deployments fast and frequent, minimizing the risk of bugs each time we push new changes live. We built the Deploy feature to help teams measure performance and improve stability of their mainline systems. In addition to key metrics like deployment frequency, you can also see which repositories take the longest to deploy or fail to deploy most often.

✨  What’s new?

• Time from open to deploy: average time from opening to deploying a pull request
• Deployment frequency: count of production deployments per developer per day
• Time between deployments: average time between successful deployments
• Deployment run time: average time elapsed per deployment
• Slowest deployments: repositories that take the longest to deploy
• Deployment success rate: count of successful production deployments vs. the total over time
• Least successful deployments: repositories that fail to deploy most frequently
• Deployment batch size: average number of code changes per deployment

💭   How does it work?

1. Go to our Deploys feature to see your data. It works out-of-the-box with our existing GitHub integration if you’re using GitHub Actions, deployments, or releases.
2. We automatically detect how you deploy each repository, but you can also manually assign specific workflow runs, check runs, deployments, and releases as production deployments for each repository.

👋   Latest from our team

• Brett wrote a guest post for InsideBigData: Why You Should Add DevOps Metrics to Your Data Fabric.

Sometimes work slips through the cracks. That’s why we built Goals — to help you stay on top of work and get notified when you don’t. Connect Slack to keep your team in the loop, with our new daily digest for in-flight work.

✨  New

• Goals: We automatically suggest goals for your team, but you can customize each goal to fit your needs. A few ideas to get you started:
  • Review pull requests in less than a day
  • Every contributor participates in a code review each week
  • Deploy pull requests within two days of being merged
• Slack Digests: Daily digests make it easy to share updates with your team about work that’s in progress and see how your team is tracking against your goals.

💡   Getting started with Slack digests (3 mins)

1. Go to our Goals feature.
2. Connect a Slack workspace.
3. You will also be prompted to set a default Slack channel for each GitHub team.
4. We’ll summarize your progress toward your goals in your team's daily digest.

👋   Latest from our team

• Mason, our CTO, was featured on DevOps Paradox, where he talked about protecting code time, finding time to focus, and creating a productive work environment.

The new Open Pull Requests view makes it easier to stay on top of work that’s in-flight. You can quickly see which pull requests are waiting for reviews or approvals, and which are ready to deploy. You can also set goals for your code reviews, so things don’t slip over time.

We’re making this feature available to everyone while in Beta.

✨  New

• Pull Requests: All your team’s open pull requests broken down by stage (awaiting review, awaiting merge, and ready to deploy). From here you can quickly find and open in GitHub any pull requests that might be stuck.
• Summary Metrics: Quick metrics on your team’s work in progress, such as the number of open pull requests and how long they’ve been waiting on review or approvals. These reflect your currently open pull requests to give you a real-time view of code reviews:
  • Pull requests in progress: Count of open PRs
  • Ready to merge: Average time since approval
  • Awaiting approval: Average time since review
  • Awaiting review: Average time since open
• Team Goals: Set team goals for code reviews (e.g. approve pull requests within a day), so you can stay on track.

👋   Latest from our team

• Geoff wrote about how teams can make deploys faster and safer in Frequent, less painful deployments.

The new Slack integration helps you collaborate on pull requests and automate your daily workflows. You can quickly see your team’s open pull requests and their current status directly in Slack, where you can then either start a group review or view them on GitHub.

✨  New

• Pull Requests: The /pull_requests Slack command shows a list of your team’s open pull requests, including their title, author, repository, and review status (e.g. needs review, commented, or approved).
• Group Reviews: You can start a group review for your pull requests in an ephemeral Slack channel. When you hover over a pull request in the web app, you can now either View on GitHub or Start a Group Review, which creates a new Slack channel with the name of the pull request.
• Daily Standups: The /daily_standup Slack command provides a quick way to share updates with your team without needing to find, copy, and paste the names and links for all your open pull requests.

👋   Latest from our team

• Brett shares a few ways teams can experiment with code reviews in An efficient code review process has fast feedback loops. 

You can now get deeper insights into the health of your code review process. The Review section shows you how long it takes to review, approve, and merge pull requests. You can also view the average pull request size (to prevent large pull requests from blocking reviews) and code review participation (to ensure the review workload is shared across team members).

We’re making this feature available to everyone while in Beta.

✨  New

• Time to Review, Approve, Merge: Get a breakdown of your code review process by stage to see where you can experiment and improve.
• Pull Request Size: See the average number of lines of code changed per pull request.
• Code Review Participation: See the percent of contributors on your team participating in code reviews.

💎  Improvements

• Filter by team: Team filters help you quickly drill down into the most important data for you and your team by allowing you to filter metrics by team. Teams are automatically synced from GitHub.
• Settings: Organization settings now include a new GitHub tab, where you can add or remove team members from your billing plan

🐞  Fixes

• Fixed an issue where users were not receiving their weekly DevOps metrics email report.
• Fixed a few small issues with graph labels and subtitles to make them clearer.

👋   Latest from our team

• Brett, co-founder here at Software, wrote an article in Fast Company: Leaders: You’re sitting on a goldmine that will help you create better flexible-work policies.

Today we’re excited to announce that we raised $15m from 8VC and Next47. You can read more about our funding announcement on our blog. 

First, we’d like to say thank you to the teams who use Software every day and have shared their valuable feedback with us over the last few years.

We’ve built an incredible community of over 250,000 developers from around the world. Our data platform provides DevOps metrics to engineering teams from more than 150 countries working across dozens of different industries. Your support has been immensely meaningful to everyone here at Software.  

Second, we’re excited to share that, over the next few months, we’ll be releasing a series of powerful new features for measuring and improving DevOps performance: 

• Deeper insights with new ways to visualize your DevOps metrics—including delivery velocity, delivery volume, and late stage rework 
• Advanced global benchmarks to help you see where you stand compared to other companies in the market
• Custom email reporting, custom dashboards, and flexible data exploration
• New integrations to the Software.com platform to improve visibility into all of your DevOps data

We have so many exciting updates planned for our community and we look forward to getting your feedback along the way. 

If you’re interested in getting early access to new features, you can sign up on the beta waitlist. 

Today we're officially flipping the switch on Auto Flow Mode, a new way for developers to protect their flow with better and smarter automation. 

If you have Auto Flow Mode turned on in your Code Time settings, your flow mode automations will now be seamlessly triggered during high velocity coding sessions.  

Auto Flow Mode detects when you are in flow and automatically triggers customizable workflows to silence distractions and prevent interruptions. You can automatically block Slack notifications, let your team know you are In Flow with a custom status message, and protect focus time on your calendar.

Here's how to configure Auto Flow Mode:

1. Open the Code Time view in your code editor or IDE. Click the gear icon next to the Flow Mode button to configure your Auto Flow Mode settings. 

2. Toggle on (or off) Automatic Flow Mode. Click the save button at the bottom.

3. Connect Slack to pause Slack Notifications and connect Google Calendar or Microsoft Outlook to block time in your calendar when you're in flow.

5. Code! Flow Mode will automatically turn on when you're in a high velocity coding session.

You can also learn more about automatic flow mode and why we built it in a post written by Mason, our CTO.

Today we're releasing a small improvement to our definition of 90-day rolling averages for active code time. 

To better understand how much time you spend coding during a typical day, your 90-day rolling average now includes days when you did not spend time coding.

As developers, we know that we are often responsible for a variety of non-coding tasks at work, such as meetings, code reviews, and project planning. As a result, most developers don’t code every day. We hope to better reflect in our metrics the reality that many developers face at work. 

For example, if you coded for several hours on Monday, but had long meetings on Tuesday and were not able to code, both days will now be included in your 90-day average. Previously, your 90-day rolling average only included days when you spent time coding. 

Note that we're updating our algorithm for rolling averages, but your total active code time each day will remain unchanged. As always, you can browse your historical data in your dashboard.

You can read the full definition of active code time.

You can now switch between light and dark mode in the web app. 

To toggle dark mode on, click the sun icon on the top right of the navigation bar next to your name. To toggle dark mode off, simply click the moon icon. 

Dark mode also works when creating a DevOps performance report with the new GitHub integration. 

Enjoy!