Configurations for data quality

The article provides an overview of settings to ensure your data is accurate in Swarmia and links you to further reading and the related settings in the Swramia app.

Data quality is crucial for building trust in engineering intelligence tools and ensuring sound decision-making. Teams often work differently—using Scrum, Kanban, or other practices—which can lead to inconsistencies. Issues like mismatched user identities, inconsistent issue tracking, or conflicting label usage can impact data reliability. That’s why we prioritize accurate and transparent data by showing what's behind each metric, automating the setup whenever possible, and offering tools to close any quality gaps that might remain.

Organization settings

At the Swarmia organization level, you integrate your tools, configure global settings, and organize your contributors into Swarmia teams. At the team level, you ensure the right issues and pull requests are assigned to teams.

• Creating teams. To see your data in Swarmia, you need to organize contributors into teams. You can sync teams from GitHub, use Swarmia API, or create teams manually. Teams & members settings.

• Contributors. Ensure work items are assigned to the right people. Swarmia automatically merges the identities across the systems contributors interact with. Make manual adjustments as needed. Contributor settings.

• Issues: projects, types, statuses. Select projects to sync. Swarmia maps issue types and statuses automatically and you can make adjustments if needed. Swarmia Jira settings.

• Pull request exclusions. By default, pull requests from all synced repositories are visible in the Swarmia metrics. Create filters to exclude specific pull requests automatically. Pull request settings.

• Investment categories. Use Swarmia default settings or define rules on how to group pull requests and issues into investment categories. Investment category settings.

• Deployments. Configure deployments to track DORA metrics. Swarmia supports multiple setup options to match your needs. Deployments settings.

Team settings

Once the organization-level settings are ready, you and the teams can proceed with team-level settings to ensure the right issues and pull requests are assigned to each team.

• Mapping issues to teams. Assign issues to teams to make them visible in Swarmia. Swarmia automatically suggests a project for each team. If multiple teams use the same project, you can assign the issues with, e.g., labels or custom fields. Team issue settings.

• Pull request exclusions. By default, Swarmia associates everyone's pull requests with all the teams they belong to. You can create rules to exclude specific pull requests from your team. Team pull request settings.

• Team notifications. Slack notifications make work visible and provide a feedback loop to stick to working agreements to create lasting habits. Team notifications settings.

• Inviting team members. Invite team members to collaborate in Swarmia and enable their personal GitHub-Slack notifications. Swarmia home.

• Linking pull requests to issues. Swarmia automatically links pull requests to issues and offers ways to do it manually when a PR contains too little information to automatically link. Pull request inbox.

• Improving categorization rate. A high categorization rate (more than 80% of work categorized) is essential to have good visibility into where engineering time goes. You can find the items the categorization rules didn't catch and assign the right category in the Investment balance.

• Configuring sprints. Swarmia automatically selects a Jira board that has Sprints and enables sprint activity tracking. You can change the board in Team issue settings.