Changelog - 2022

echoes is released continuously, our changelog is therefore an arbitrary month to month aggregation of changes december newrelic integration the new relic integration allows echoes to pull incident information in order to compute the mean time to recovery like any other integration in echoes, multiple connections can be created toward different new relic accounts in order to cover the entirety of the scope of interest read the new relic integration documentation for more information efforts api the efforts api lets you export echoes data to your tools of choice the data is exposed in multiple formats, including csv in order to be imported directly into spreadsheets linear label groups linear label groups are an elegant way to organize labels within a linear instance echoes leverage this new feature to organize the labels it creates on your linear team november refreshed navigation the pages layout and navigation within the product has been significantly improved around simpler, less busy reports, and area of interest (a team, the organization as a whole) this marks our last planned incremental user experience refresh before our next major milestone improved advanced filters some controls have been moved at the report level show initiatives (default on) when disabled, data for initiatives is reported on their components show archived intents (default off) show intents without efforts (default off) improvements and bugfixes github improved the onboarding experience for users with hundreds of repositories slack report fix the report being sent at the wrong time with daylight saving tagger disable auto reloading on focus when the tagger window is visibile october selectively enable efforts and impediments labels the publication of effort labels docid\ te7qtraspc4rt3swmiv3m and impediment labels docid\ n1pdwpeb8uhxlmj2keu6r to your github and gitlab repositories can be selectively enabled lead time "preparation" segment when used with jira or linear, echoes examines the delay between a ticket being started and its first linked commit, and report this under the lead time docid\ uaynegynbwb4hk1hajkfa "preparation" segment auditable billing the billing administration page now shows the details of all billable members of your organizations (i e , members of echoes teams with registered git contributions on the billing period) improvements and bugfixes jira fix an issue where intents within the "echoes intent" custom field would get duplicated on installations with over 50 intents jira fix the plugin's uninstall and upgrade flows performance the app performance was significantly improved, most notably for dora metrics releases the deliverables are now listed together with the deployment events september organization health report the organization health report aims to help engineering executives assess whether teams are in the right conditions to succeed, and which are the the ones that need support this first release comes with three categories of indicators team setup , with the average tenure of members of the team, and its churn rate software delivery performance , with the four dora metrics echoes already supported impediments , with the challenges faced by engineers in their development efforts see the complete organization health docid 6lcnxorsh4fpb4y1ai07d documentation for more information register efforts from linear issues linear issues labeled with an effort label (e g , echoes/effort m ) now contribute to the recorded efforts on their corresponding outcome or initiative this allows for tasks happening outside of git to be accounted for in echoes the sizing of the task are homogeneous with pull requests labels, meaning that a ticket labeled "xs" will be accounted in the same proportion than a github pull request or gitlab merge request labeled "xs" see the complete linear docid\ msgmffbt88g7mneq1s 6b documentation for more information redesigned team management continuing on a multi week effort to improve on the user experience, the team and member management has been redesigned to follow more closely that of outcomes and initiatives as part of this redesign was added the ability to assign a color to a team improvements and bugfixes filters hide outcomes and initiatives from the main report for which none of the selected teams have any registered effort linear fix an issue where a pull request label would not be inherited from a linear issue identified by its lowercase identifier in the branch name august collapsible sidebar and fixed filters the sidebar can now be collapsed to give more space to what really matters the content of your reports similarly, the filters will now collapse and follow you down the page as you scroll to give you a chance to change your selection of team or dates at any point redesigned allocation overview the "participations" table is gone from the main report this table used to show for each team in the organization their proportion of github pull requests or gitlab merge requests tagged using echoes labels while this was once considered crucial, many features (most notably the integration with issue trackers docid\ vi oahcmnxhj3jg2trhbq and the github docid\ sx5k4dytpcgcvkajjzqkj ) have since made this concern disappear entirely with the table gone, the space is used for an improved display of the allocation overview redesigned effort distribution table the effort distribution table shows the allocation of efforts on a team per team and intent per intent basis it is one of the components most valuable to engineering leaders to get a quick glance of how engineering capacity is being used this component is now capable of supporting a larger number of teams and intents sso enable idp initiated authentication flow echoes support for single sign on (sso) now includes the ability to initiate the authentication flow from your identity provider for additional instructions, follow the documentation for https //docs echoeshq com/google#supzv or https //docs echoeshq com/okta#btubf github handle organization's members changes the echoes github app now handles member events members added to the github organization are automatically created in echoes as part of the "undispatched contributors" default team, without waiting for their first contribution to appear members removed from the github organization are automatically moved to the "undispatched contributors" default team their history of contributions is preserved, but they won't appear as active members of their former team improvements and bugfixes filters fix the "custom" period filter was fixed to account for overlapping weeks filters fix the period filter to initialize its state with the currently selected settings github automated label checks on pull requests are disabled by default to avoid confusion heatmap hide columns for outcomes and initiatives without efforts from selected teams jira fix account linking jira fix an issue where intents could get duplicated when the configuration undergoes multiple changes saml fix an issue where the first login attempt for a user would fail slack guarantee a consistent allocation overview layout in the weekly report tagger hide inactive outcomes and initiatives from available labels units of work don't include items in the scope of the reviewer's team july daily and weekly reports over slack each team can opt in to an automated report on the slack channel of their choice, delivered at the time of their choice the reports comes in two flavors a daily report, focusing on the ongoing work items, their progress in the delivery pipeline, and how much time they have spent in their current status a weekly report, focusing on the distribution of efforts on the previous week across the configured outcomes and initiatives read the documentation to enable slack notifications slack reports docid 7d7zn5uwjwkrv5r0ipxas experimental compute mttr from pagerduty incidents the pagerduty integration is an experimental feature being rolled out progressively to our user base feel free to reach out if you'd like it activated for your company following the recent introduction of the pagerduty docid\ peupkwaxsrrn5gtl40yyc integration, echoes is now capable of computing the mttr ( mean time to recovery docid\ lgfiztdecxm2tq2kurlip ) from collected incidents information per deliverable deployment frequency the deployment frequency is now visible both per team, and per deliverable this allows you to distinguish the frequency across different services or components miscellaneous bugfixes fix the displayed status for a completed initiative fix incorrect week number in the trajectory view fix the sidebar layout which caused some visible flickering upon page change exclude weekends from lead time computation the "ongoing initiatives" in the allocation report no longer shows initiatives without any efforts june experimental pagerduty integration the pagerduty integration is an experimental feature being rolled out progressively to our user base feel free to reach out if you'd like it activated for your company the pagerduty integration allows echoes to connect to your pagerduty instance in other to gather data on production incidents the data collected by this integration will for example feed the mttr (mean time to recovery) metrics and more in the future in flight and backlog items in the intent report the intent report is a zoom in on a specific outcome or initiative, presenting the activity over time and how it impacts the different teams this report now shows in flight the pull requests (github) and merge requests (gitlab) contributing to the intent under examination which are still open, with additional details on the current phase and delays completed completed efforts contributing to the intent under examination backlog the remaining opened tickets labeled with the intent under examination across integrations (e g , github issues, jira user stories) this view will continue to evolve in order to highlight blockers and outliers in your development flow optionally apply initiatives composition changes to past efforts changing the composition of an initiatve can now be retroactively applied to past efforts when the option to retroactively apply composition changes to past efforts is checked, echoes will reprocess historical data upon saving the initiative past efforts will be updated with the new composition, as if the initiative was always defined this way while this process is irreversible, you still have the ability to revert the initiative to its past definition and retroactively apply that change preserve published labels upon renaming this is a sensitive change which is progressively being rolled out, account per account, and integration per integration published labels are no longer deleted and recreated when an outcome or initiative is modified this behavior had the undesired side effect of removing past annotations when the original label got deleted (for example on github issues or jira tickets) miscellaneous bugfixes fixed an issue with linear integration for teams with a high number of labels fixed an issue where github labels would remain after the corresponding outcome or initiative was deleted fixed an issue where the intent on a jira issue would not properly be updated when changed fixed an issue preventing echoes to fall back on a jira ticket creator when no assignee is present may experimental activity map the activity overview is an experimental feature being rolled out progressively to our user base feel free to reach out if you'd like it activated for your company the activity map presents the flow of value in your product engineering organization in a synthetic way it highlights how initiatives contribute to outcomes, and for each how much efforts have been spent on the period (compared to the previous period), and how far we are (compared to the previous period) the activity map, like all other reports, can be filtered on specific teams or a specific time window filter persistence the initial state of filters (e g , selected teams, time period, and intent) were always initialized based on the logged in user's position within the organization however, they are many cases in which users want to exclude a team from the reports, or always look at their report through the same time window the state of filters are persisted across reports as you navigate the app using your browser's local storage dashboard refresh after items are tagged echoes provides a builtin tagger to annotate github pull requests or gitlab merge requests directly from the app after tagging items through this method, echoes now refreshes the dashboard to reflect the new annotations note because we rely on the labels being ackowledged by either github or gitlab, a small delay may remain before all user actions get reflected in the data improve release intent distribution the distribution of intent of a given release is now taking initiatives into account and can show for any selected release the accurate distribution of efforts across outcomes the release timeline is also improved to accomodate for situations where deployment frequency is very high miscellaneous add a change password link to the user profile fix an issue where an installation of the jira plugin would fail under certain circumstances prevent force push from alterting pull requests lead time computation prevent the ability to drag a team as a sibbling of the organization root april tagged linear issues contribute to initiatives scope linear issue labels with an initiatives will now be considered part of that initiative's scope, and will therefore contribute to the initiative's measure of progress initiative target completion date an optional target completion date can be set on initiatives at creation time and changed at any point this information, combined with echoes knowledge of the effort and progress on the initiative, is used to indicate the status of the initiative status is defined as followed status definition on track the initiative is likely to be delivered by its target date at risk the initiative is at risk of not meeting its target date off track the initiative will not be completed by its target date given the current pace of progress unknown an estimated completion date could not be computed this may happen when echoes has insufficient data regarding the activity on this initiative pull request approval as a component of the lead time this feature is being rolled out progressively for our github users in addition to being broken down into the time to merge (i e , delay between a first commit and a pull request being merged) and the time to deploy (i e , delay between the pull request being merged and its deployment), the lead time will now display take into consideration the moment at which a pull request was approved zooming on an outcome or initiative names of outcomes or initiatives throughout the report are now link to a dedicated report showing the activity on that particular intent this space shows you an activity timeline, where in the organization have these efforts taken place, and the list of individual units contributing to it improve github interactions for large organizations echoes would occasionally hit github api limits for organizations with hundred of repositories this could have led to visible delays in data integration or on automated pull requests checks we have significantly improved our interactions with the github api to prevent this from happening improve github installation flow when an owner's approval is required improve the experience when the user doing the onboarding does not have the permissions to approve the installation of the github app on the target organization this flow used to create a lot of confusion as the approver would be redirected to echoes without having an account for it please note that while the user experience was significantly improved, the installation flow still requires a manual step by echoes support for security reasons ignore merge commits within pull requests and merge requests in situations where for example a staging branch is merged into main , echoes knows how to prevent previously known commits from being accounted for multiple times however such pull request may contain merge commits only present on the staging branch which echoes had never seen as part of a prior pull request echoes now ignores any non ordinary commit (that is a commit with a number of parents different than 1) within github pull requests and gitlab merge requests as a result, a pull request which introduces no new commits but only merges existing commits into another branch will not be accounted for anymore prevent stale labels on issue trackers fix a situation where labels on issue trackers (i e , jira "echoes intent" custom field, linear labels, shortcut labels) would become stale and not reflect echoes' internal configuration march opt in label creation to public github repositories echoes no longer creates labels for outcomes and initiatives on public github repositories by default this is a defensive measure to avoid accidentally disclosing roadmap information through labels publication to public repositories must be enabled selectively on a per outcome and per initiative basis in scoped publication docid\ ydhbuef7ei1ns6pv3flvi shareable report links the share button copies to your clipboard a report link which includes the state of your filters this makes it easy to share the exact same view you are looking at to your coworkers, and to save report links in internal documentation filter on custom date range the period filter on reports lets you pick a custom date range searchable intent filter for organizations with a large number of outcomes and initiatives, the intent filter can be searched lead time display read the full documentation vitals deprecated docid\ ktnxfehbwgpmnbxy0xfli following last month release of the vitals report, this month are introduced improvements to the lead time visualization based on your feedbacks in particular, the lead time can now be examined as a breakdown of its components (at this time first commit to merge, and merge to deployment), over time, and on a team per team basis february vitals report read the full documentation vitals deprecated docid\ ktnxfehbwgpmnbxy0xfli the vitals report shows you the measures made popular by the dora research program and the associated book accelerate the report provides the two tempo metrics of lead time and deployment frequency, which are now considered as industry standards to measure software delivery performance measure progress on initiatives echoes reports the progress on initiatives by collecting issues tagged with their corresponding labels across all integrations (e g , github issues, jira tickets) it shows the number of completed and remaining tasks over time, how these numbers changed since last week, and how far you are from completion github task lists are also supported each individual task will contribute to the total tagging issues with the initiatives they contribute to is all it takes to benefit from this feature as a reminder, tagging issues has the added benefits that pull requests linked to such an issue (for example through a "closes #xxxx" on github" or a jira reference ) will automatically inherit its labels units of work timeline and filters the units of work view now includes filters on teams and intent, and a timeline showing the volume of contributions across time indirect effort in trajectory table the trajectory table previously hid efforts on initiatives components when initiatives were displayed while this made sense to avoid showing duplicated efforts, it gave the wrong impression that no efforts were contributed to the underlying goals when initiatives are displayed, the trajectory table will now reports both the efforts going directly into an outcome as well as the indirect efforts contributed through initiatives exclude empty lines from trajectory table the trajectory table now filters out lines that have no relevant data to be shown, such as deleted outcomes or initiatives with no efforts on the period under examination actionable github checks messages automated github checks provide better feedback on the reason why a check is skipped in particular, the details explain when a check was skipped because the author doesn't belong to any team in echoes configuration, and the steps to fix it if necessary january account for activities happening outside of git echoes can now account for efforts which are happening outside of github pull requests or gitlab merge requests, such as investigating an incident, or creating new resources in your cloud provider echoes will now account for completed tickets when they are tagged with an effort value in jira, the " echoes intent " custom field lets you set the intent of this issue (as defined within echoes) upon completion of the issue, the " echoes effort " custom field will be used to account for the effort using the same t shirt size scale used for pull requests accounting for efforts described in tickets is currently supported for jira docid 894ilvdbdj3sdmgz0hm3i integrations shortcut integration read the full documentation shortcut docid\ nrxzed ejxkt3lgwaihpu you can now connect echoes to your shortcut workspace echoes creates shortcut labels for each of its configured outcomes and initiatives shortcut stories can then be tagged with their intent as defined within echoes a github pull request or gitlab merge request referencing a linear issue will automatically inherit its labels, without requiring any manual action from the author multiple user experience improvements this month were shipped dozens of small user experience improvements, many we owe to our users feedback the non exhaustive and unordered list includes significantly simplify navigation with the sidebar redesign parts of the units of work table to account for items outside of git fix the page selection in units of work table fix the missing horizontal scrollbar in units of work table fix the confusing buttons in the outcomes and initiatives creation flow fix the documentation link not opening in a new tab fix a bug where the list of initiatives wouldn't scale to its content 2021 december linear integration read the full documentation linear docid\ msgmffbt88g7mneq1s 6b you can now connect echoes to your linear workspace echoes creates linear issue labels for each of its configured outcomes and initiatives linear issues can then be tagged with their intent as defined within echoes a github pull request or gitlab merge request referencing a linear issue will automatically inherit its labels, without requiring any manual action from the author releases instrumentation you can declare releases through the new releases docid\ hx6 lkqjnbzgy8wk82b3n api this will feed into a new dashboard displaying your timeline of releases per team, and the ability to inspect the content of releases based on their intent jira custom field options deletion the jira integration would not, under certain conditions, properly remove custom field options as outcomes and initiatives get deleted from the configuration read multiple jira issue keys from a single item echoes previously extracted a single issue key from a github pull request (or gitlab merge request) title, branch name, or commit message headline echoes will now follow every issue key is finds and will follow the links for each of them november inherit tags from parent jira issue read the full documentation jira docid 894ilvdbdj3sdmgz0hm3i a github pull request or gitlab merge request previously inherited labels from their linked jira issue and its parent epic (if any) we now follow the "parent" link, which means that you can reference a jira subtask and inherit intent from the entire ancestry in the example above, a pull request references jira sub task jira 3 in its title echoes successively inspects jira 3 , its parent story jira 2 , and the parent epic jira 1 , collecting all values of the intent field along the path it finds an intent on the epic and applies the corresponding label to the pull request this required a single tag in jira, and no developer action redesign outcomes and initiatives user experience the outcomes and initiatives creation screen have been redesigned for clarity we now guide through the creation process and preview how labels will appear on github or gitlab experimental support for saml sso read the full documentation single sign on docid\ kuqcopar xhayire0d45m echoes, acting as the service provider (sp), supports single sign on through saml using external identity providers (idps) such as okta, onelogin and microsoft active directory federation service echoes is compatible with all external idps that support saml 2 0 experimental support for hris integrations read the full documentation teams docid\ sbtt 5p3kea8topws5x3s echoes can retrieve both the description of the organization tree and its members through connecting to your company's hr system we support a large number of providers thanks to our provider finch github scoped publication read the full documentation scoped publication docid\ ydhbuef7ei1ns6pv3flvi scoped publication allows to finely pick how outcomes and initiatives should be published to your github organization it allows to prevent certain labels to be created on selected repositories