Creating & managing teams

You can use three methods to create your teams:

• Create new team manually in team settings.

• Import teams from GitHub

• Integrate with Swarmia Teams API

Defining team members

You can add three kinds of members to teams:

1. GitHub users

   1. You can search and add individual GitHub users to teams in Swarmia.

   2. By default, the search only returns users that currently belong to your GitHub organization. If you need to add users outside of your GitHub organization (e.g., contractors) or historical users (e.g., previous employees), you can find them by searching with their exact GitHub username.

2. GitHub teams

   1. You can add whole GitHub teams as team members to automatically keep your teams up-to-date when GitHub teams are updated. GitHub also provides an API to manage the teams, which can be used to automate team management in Swarmia.
3. Contributors not belonging to your GitHub organization

   1. In certain situations, like when working with contractors, it can be beneficial to be able to add contributors from outside of your company's GitHub organization to your Swarmia Teams.

   2. To do this, you will just need to type in their exact GitHub username into the search field.

   3. This adds their contributions to your team's metrics in Swarmia, but they will still not have access to your Swarmia instance without access to your GitHub organization.

Importing teams in Bulk from GitHub allows you to select multiple GitHub teams and to quickly create new Swarmia teams from those. After you have imported the team, the team memberships are kept in sync with the GitHub teams. When importing teams, we show you which teams are already imported and which teams you can still select to import.

Setting up hierarchies

Creating the team hierarchy is simple and easy within Swarmia.

1. Ensure that you have created the 'Parent' team(s) in your team structure.

   1. This parent team will inherit the membership of the later assigned subteams, but in order to first establish the parent team, you will need to add at least one member.

2. Create desired subteams, and map them to the appropriate Parent Team.

   1. Depending on your organizational structure, you might need to repeat the same process multiple times (for different levels of your organization).

You don't need to create a team to resemble your entire engineering organization. You can automatically use the organization level, even if you don't create any hierarchy of teams.

Teams with subteams

• For the most part, teams with subteams work just like other Swarmia teams. No additional configuration is required.

  • For teams with subteams, the work shown everywhere across Swarmia is defined as a combination of their subteams’ work.

  • You can add working agreements and enable notifications for teams on all levels.

  • You can add direct members or GitHub teams or to any team, even if the team has subteams.

Limitations

• Each team can only have one parent team. This means you can't use team hierarchy to map a matrix organization structure. Please contact Swarmia support via the in-app chat if you would have a need for such a configuration.

• If you convert a team to a parent team, it loses any filters around team ownership it previously had — they will be inherited from the subteams instead.

Refining Team Ownership

Teams are important for managing which pull requests (PRs) and issues are included in the data for different Swarmia features, from insights to working agreements. You'll want to ensure that the Pull Request and Issue Ownership of your team is correct to ensure the most accurate metrics. Selecting Slack channels enables team notifications and daily digest.

1. Team Pull Request Ownership

   1. By default, we include any PRs created by anyone in the team. You can configure PR ownership rules for teams to adjust which work is included by navigating to the Team Pull Request page.
2. Team Issue Ownership

   1. To unlock Issue data in Swarmia in the Work Log view and Flow Insights, you will first need to assign Team Issue Ownership in Settings → Team → Issues.
   2. Once a team has been properly mapped, they will show up as 'assigned' in the Team Management page.

3. Team Slack channel

   1. Select Slack channel to receive team notifications and daily digest. Configure the Slack channel in Settings → Team → Notifications

Right after you have created the team, Swarmia suggests the right issue tracker project and Slack channel for the team. You can confirm, override or skip the selection.