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.
