Coach software developers

Visualize engineering work with Developer Overview

Work Log and Investment Balance are great tools for visualizing engineering teams’ work and significantly improving their focus and flow. Developer Overview does the same thing with an emphasis on the work of individual engineers.

What does it do?

Developer Overview combines activity from issues and PRs to visualize what each developer has worked on. This aims to surface potential areas of improvement and helps facilitate discussions about work.

The feature allows developers and their managers to:

• Make work visible. Identify who the developer has worked with recently, compare the ratio of own pull requests to reviewed pull requests, and navigate to past work items to analyze them in more detail.

• Visualize activity patterns. Quickly see all the projects the developer has contributed to and spot systemic issues like too much work in progress or working alone on bigger issues.

• Analyze focus. Assess whether the developer has been able to focus on the right things and maximize their learning and impact.

A view for developers

Developer Overview is not a tool for stack ranking individuals or reducing them into a single number. In fact, the view is first and foremost a tool for developers to learn and grow in their career.

Here are some questions that you might answer with this view:

• Have I been working on the things that I want to work on? Let's say I wanted to work with databases more this year. Did that actually happen?

• How can I justify getting a raise or a promotion? What were the biggest successful projects that I worked on this year that I can bring up to my manager in our performance review?

• Am I reviewing enough pull requests? If I have opened more PRs than I have reviewed, that might not be fair to my team members.

• How can I learn from my mistakes? What were some projects that didn't go so well, and what would I do differently now?

• Who did I work with the most? They are probably the best people to ask for feedback to improve.

A view for managers

For engineering managers, this view provides a way to reduce personal bias when evaluating someone's performance. It is easy to fall into giving better ratings for people we like when you don't have the hard facts about what they worked on.

Some questions that managers might answer with this view are:

• What projects did this person work on? How much impact did they have on the project, and how well did the project go?

• Are they reviewing enough pull requests? You probably want to distribute pull request reviews evenly among the team when possible.

• Who have they worked with the most? You might want to ask for feedback from these people too to get a full picture of their performance.

How does it work?

You can navigate to Developer Overview by clicking anyone's avatar.

To see your own data, click My overview under your profile picture in the navigation sidebar.

Developer Overview provides three views into data:

• Activity provides visibility into the larger projects in your issue tracker that a developer has worked on. This is good for understanding where the majority of their time has gone.

• Focus provides visibility into the types of work that a developer has done (by investment category). Have they spent most of their time fixing bugs or building new features? We take no stance here what is the right balance that's specific to your situation.

• Pull requests provides easy access to pull requests that a developer has authored and reviewed.