We’ve improved our feature calculations to automatically ignore pull requests in development workflows—such as dependency updates, back merges, and releases—that are not representative of developer productivity. These improvements have been requested by customers. As a result of this update, you may see a slight decrease in features per engineer, and industry benchmarks will be more accurate.

A pull request is excluded from your metrics if it meets any of the following criteria:

• It is authored by a bot (e.g. a dependency update)
• The head branch is the default branch (e.g. a back merge to sync changes from default into a development branch)
• It does not include any unique commits that haven’t already existed in a previous pull request (e.g. merging a release branch into main)
• More than three authors merged a pull request into the head branch (e.g. a long-lived feature branch)

You can review the list of pull requests that are included/excluded in our definitions by hovering over a data point and viewing more pull requests in the flyout.

Based on feedback from our community, we’ve made several improvements to our active engineers algorithm:

Improvements

• We’ve updated our active engineers definition to include users in your Git organization who have contributed or reviewed code in the last 30 days. Previously, only users who created pull requests were included. Users who exclusively review pull requests — such as team managers — will now be included in the active engineer count.

Bug fixes

• We’ve updated several queries to ensure that a 30-day rolling average of active engineers is always used. Previously, an active engineer may have been excluded if they did not create a pull request in a specific week.
• We’ve added better automatic detection for pull requests authored by bots, such as Dependabot updates. As a result, you may notice a decrease in your features per engineer metric. As a reminder, you can always manually filter out bots under Settings / Git Users.

Today we’re releasing a small but helpful improvement to our app for Slack. In our latest update, you can now send notifications — including daily and weekly digests — to private channels in your workspace.

To get started, you’ll need to approve new permissions for our Slack app (it takes just a few seconds). Head over to your team’s Connected Apps in your organization’s Settings and click Upgrade Slack.

⚡ How to send notifications

To send notifications to a private slack channel, you will need to first add our bot to the channel.

1. Select the channel where you want to send notifications.
2. In the message field, type “@Software.com” and hit send. Follow the prompts in Slack to invite our bot to this channel.
3. Visit your organization settings in the Software.com web app. In the Notifications section, refresh the dropdown menu and select your private channel.

You can learn more about our app in the Slack marketplace.

We recently released Feature Breakdowns to give you more insight into what work is categorized as new, churn, and refactor during a given time period. You can access breakdowns by clicking on a data point in the Feature Breakdown chart.

💡 As a quick refresher, features are broken down into three types:

• New: new code added
• Churn: code reworked less than 21 days after being merged
• Refactor: code reworked more than 21 days after being merged

Based on feedback from our community, we’ve slightly modified how these calculations work. Instead of aggregating line changes over a time period and then multiplying the ratios by the total number of features, we are now averaging the breakdown per feature. As a result, you will likely see a lower number for % New Features vs. Rework. Our industry benchmarks have been adjusted accordingly.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us at support@software.com.

Our new Jira integration provides you with a more complete picture of lead time, all the way from issue in progress to changes deployed. When you connect Jira, we automatically link your team’s pull requests to issues, giving you visibility into time spent on changes even before the first commit.

✨  What’s new?

• Measure lead time from issue in progress to deploy, for end-to-end visibility into team efficiency.
• Get a more complete view of development time, the time between starting an issue to opening a pull request.
• No configuration required. We automatically link Jira issues and pull requests if a pull request name contains a project prefix and number associated with a Jira issue (e.g. JRA-123).

⚡ Get started with Jira

You can connect Jira from the Atlassian marketplace in just a few minutes, or learn more in our documentation. You will be able to choose your workspace and review permissions before installing the app.

We’ve redesigned our Slack app from the ground up to elevate your team’s collaboration and productivity. With new features — like reminders for blocked pull requests and previews of upcoming deployments — you can keep your team on track and stay on top of work that’s in-flight.

It’s also now easier than ever to try out our Slack integration. Starting today, you can find our app in the official Slack marketplace.

✨ What’s new

• Deployment previews: When you’re ready to ship, send a preview of your upcoming deployments to team members in Slack.
• Digests: Share updates with your team and see how your team is tracking against your working agreements.
• Reminders: Get automated reminders when pull requests waiting on review, approval, merge, and deployment do not meet your working agreements.
• Async reviews: Start group code reviews and create new Slack channels for your pull requests to collect and share feedback during the code review process.
• Standup bot: Automate daily standup by generating a message that recaps your recently closed and currently open pull requests.

⚡ Get started with Slack

You can learn more about our app for Slack in the marketplace.

We’re starting off the year with new insights into lead time to help you understand how long it takes you to make product changes. With the lead time dashboard, you can answer questions like:

• How are we performing relative to before?
• Where are there bottlenecks in our development process?
• Which changes took us the longest to make?
• Is this increase in our lead time caused by longer review and deploy times or an increase in our work load?

✨  What’s new?

• Breakdowns of lead time by stage, team, repository, and label to help you identify bottlenecks.
• Comparisons to previous period to see how your team is trending.
• Related metrics, such as review turnaround time and time to deploy, to see what’s impacting lead time.
• Insight into which changes took the longest to make, organized by pull request.

👋  Get in touch

We’d love to hear your feedback on our new lead time insights. Otherwise, stay tuned — we have some exciting updates in the weeks ahead.

Our latest update helps you stay on top of work that’s ready to be deployed and prevent large backlogs of changes. With new deployment metrics and more powerful Slack notifications, you can make your team’s deployments faster, easier, and more frequent.

✨  What’s new?

• Keep a pulse on the overall health of your deployment process with new summary metrics. Get insight into how long it takes to deploy changes, the number of recent deployments, and the success rate of those deployments.
• Track upcoming deployments with a summary of pull requests ready to ship, organized by repository and sorted by the maximum age of changes waiting to be deployed.
• Notify your team team of changes that need to be deployed with deployment previews in Slack.
• Prevent changes from becoming stale by setting up notifications when changes are not deployed within some number of days of being merged.
• View recent deployments to keep track of previously released changes.

🔷  Get started with previews in Slack

When you send a preview of a deployment to Slack, we’ll share a summary of the pull requests ready to ship and their authors. Head over to your Upcoming Deployments and select View to open an information panel, where you can then select the channel you want to notify.

👋  Get in touch

Need help connecting Slack or configuring deployments? You can find some time to chat with us and we’ll walk you through how you can use the Ready to Deploy feature to improve your team’s velocity.

We’ve listened to your feedback over the last several months. We’re updating our pricing to be simpler and more flexible. Our Pro plan now starts at $99/mo for organizations of up to 20 developers.

When you upgrade, you'll unlock instant access to your team's lead time trend over the last three months. We've also added features to supercharge your team, like a Slack weekly digest and notifications to remind you about slipping work. 

Additional integrations, such as CI/CD tools, start at $33/mo and can be added to your plan for more advanced insights into your deployments. You can learn more about our updated plans on our website.

✨  Why the change?

• It’s simpler. Instead of charging per developer, we charge a base platform fee based on the size of your engineering organization.
• It’s predictable. With a flat monthly platform fee, you have room to grow your team without worrying about any surprise bills from us.
• Pay only for what you need. Optional add-ons, like Deployment Insights, help you get more out of our platform when you connect more integrations.

You can also schedule time with us if you’d like to learn more about how Software can help your team with faster code reviews and more frequent deployments.

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.