Pinpoint today launched a namesake operations dashboard for software development teams designed to span multiple tools and platforms.
Company CEO Jeff Haynie said the Pinpoint dashboard provides a holistic view of software development projects in a way that eliminates the need to open tabs in multiple management consoles for each tool and platform that make up a DevOps toolchain. IT leaders can employ a single issue workflow dashboard to track activity in real-time as it occurs within commonly employed DevOps platforms such as Jira, Azure Team Foundation Server (TFS), GitLab, GitHub and Bitbucket, he said.
DevOps teams can drill down into the specifics of an issue or pull request more easily to view workflows spanning multiple platforms from a single console, Haynie said. Previously, he noted, DevOps teams either had to create and maintain these integrations themselves to create a common console or log into multiple management tools that made it difficult to correlate data and events occurring across multiple platforms.
Haynie said Pinpoint expects most organizations to employ its software to identify bottlenecks in the software development process. Pinpoint has also embedded models based on machine learning algorithms to forecast where issues might arise based on the number of developers working on projects, organizational history and projected deadlines.
The goal is to make sure the organization is not simply writing more code faster but is writing the right code at the right time to make certain application development projects stay on course, noted Haynie.
Providers of various DevOps platforms have been investing in similar tools of late but Haynie noted each of those offerings is optimized for a specific platform. The Pinpoint dashboard can be integrated with any platform to provide much-needed visibility into complex workflows spanning a wide range of tools and platforms, he said.
Visibility into those projects has never been more critical in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Many organizations are trying to accelerate application development projects as part of an effort to incorporate nascent projects into much larger business continuity strategies that rely on digital business processes. As such, the feasibility of completing an application development project by a specific date has become a matter of intense debate within some organizations.
Of course, some organizations may employ the visibility enabled by Pinpoint to run roughshod over developers. However, Haynie said Pinpoint expects most organizations will employ Pinpoint to foster collaboration versus simply focusing on delivery dates. One of the biggest issues with software engineering from a business perspective is that it’s been a “black box” that has made it difficult for organizations to plan, he noted.
There are undoubtedly levels of frustration both inside and out of application development teams, given all the dependencies that now exist between projects. Many issues could be avoided if, for example, someone just realized that one project needed some additional developers to meet a deadline that needs to be met before other projects could get off the ground. It’s too early to say what impact lifting the shroud that surrounds software development might have on businesses as a whole, but at the very least there should be much greater appreciation among everyone involved for what it really takes to bring an application to fruition.
