Introducing Software Engineering Insights
Today, we are announcing a new module in the Harness software delivery platform to help engineering leaders make data-driven decisions that improve engineering productivity, efficiency, alignment, planning, and execution. Harness Software Engineering Insights™ (SEI) provides actionable insights into software delivery and workflows across teams, processes, and systems to improve software quality, enhance developer experience, and accelerate time to value. SEI joins the Harness Platform with the acquisition of Propelo, an industry leader in engineering productivity relied on by organizations including Broadcom, CDK Global, iBotta, OneMain Financial, Razorpay, Rubrik, and many other Fortune 1000 companies across industries.
SEI enables engineering leaders to proactively manage and demonstrate the performance of the engineering organization to business stakeholders with established success metrics, such as DORA and the SPACE Framework. With over 40 out-of-box integrated data sources (including GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket, Jira, PagerDuty, and Azure), you can find and remove software delivery bottlenecks while gaining a better understanding of engineering operations.
We’ve heard from many customers about their need for better insights and visibility into the software delivery lifecycle (SDLC) to boost performance, improve productivity, and increase velocity. Every company, regardless of industry, size, or DevOps maturity level, is seeking ways to remove bottlenecks and increase efficiency by doing more with less. To gain a competitive advantage, companies need to release software faster and more predictably while maintaining quality, reliability, and security.
Actionable Insights into Key Engineering Processes
SEI gives engineering leaders the data they need to make decisions that improve execution, planning, and alignment with business, finance, and product management.
Execution Insights
The data from SEI empowers engineering leaders to drive continuous improvement with visibility into the entire development process across tooling, from ticketing systems to post production. The automated workflow engine triggers notifications in response to specific events.
For example, engineering managers can identify bottlenecks in the code review process with Pull Request (PR) Review reports, while automated Slack alerts remind developers to review code. DevOps engineers can pinpoint blockers to their Continuous Integration (CI) processes, such as long-running builds. Having these insights readily available allows engineers to immediately take corrective action that helps them ship new products, updates, and features faster.
Planning Insights
Scorecards and dashboards highlight factors that impact sprint predictability. Engineering leaders can spot anomalies and unplanned work — such as missing story points or anti-patterns like large stories — to better assess if delivery is on track as planned. These insights help product and engineering collaborate, enabling best practices for product management hygiene and reducing scope creep.
Business Alignment Insights
With SEI, engineering and business stay aligned by ensuring that resources have been allocated according to business plans. Leaders can also identify wasteful or unplanned work by gaining a comprehensive breakdown of how time and resources have been invested across different categories, such as features, bugs, or technical debt.
Flexible, Scalable Features are at the Core of Software Engineering Insights
40+ Integrations Support Environments with Diverse Toolchains
Engineering leaders can confidently make data-driven decisions with complete and accurate reports drilling into each engineering team’s productivity with leading cloud and on-premise tool integrations, including GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket, Jira, PagerDuty, Azure, and many more. With more than 40 integrations available for common DevOps tools, teams can adopt SEI regardless of the underlying technology used for their SDLC processes.
Low-Code Automation
Automating trigger-based tasks reduces engineering toil while best practices are automatically enforced to drive continuous improvement. With a low-code drag-and-drop interface and out-of-the-box templates, engineering managers can create workflows that improve data hygiene and process adherence. The automation engine is highly extensible to handle complex processes.
Some common automations include alerts to:
- teams if a sprint is due, but stories were not assigned
- product managers if there are stories without points
- scrum masters if the team is overcoming stories that they won’t be able to deliver
- DevOps engineers if the failure rate is increasing
These processes can be automated based on any event or status, removing the need to manually track different reports to find anomalies that require attention.
Pre-built and Custom Reports
SEI was designed to make it easy to scale at the enterprise level with pre-built reporting templates for every facet of engineering operations. Rolling out dashboard templates accelerates adoption enterprise-wide while normalizing reporting and best practices. These reports and dashboards ensure that everyone gets the data they need, fully customized to meet diverse requirements.
Once connected to Git, Jira, and other tooling, users can immediately access a wide range of useful metrics from the pre-built dashboards, including DORA metrics and the entire pull request (PR) cycle, which indicates where slowdowns are occuring.
The reports can be customized for different teams and geographies, and advanced segmentation enables users to manage reports for different business units. After defining organizations and mapping teams, users can restrict and filter data and pull it into their custom reports.
Get Started with Software Engineering Insights
At Harness, we move fast. Just three years ago, we had a single product — the Continuous Delivery module — and now we offer a complete software delivery platform encompassing eight modules. We’ve helped thousands of organizations modernize software delivery processes with AI/ML and automation to remove toil while increasing velocity — without compromising efficiency, security, or reliability.
Interested in learning more about how Harness Software Engineering Insights can help improve your engineering outputs? Request a demo.