Changelog

echoes is released continuously, our changelog is therefore an arbitrary month to month aggregation of changes december workstreams support github sub issues github sub issues are now supported in echoes workstreams send a request to github to enroll your organization in the beta feature for sub issues november workstreams workstreams docid\ x104mzwqr9ui9jf bkuuo is the ability for you to pick any work item that already exists in your product development tools (e g , a jira epic) and supercharge its tracking with echoes simply adding a workstream to echoes gives you automatic risk identification with insights allocation measurement (how teams are allocating their effort against this workstream, and which teams are contributing to it) forecasts, and estimated date of completion dora metrics the list of selected workstreams is individual, meaning that an engineering manager can chose to follow closely a set of stories, when a director can chose to follow a handful or larger epics exclude contributions from effort computation in certain cases you don't want a github pull request or gitlab merge request to be accounted for in the effort computation, for example because it was fully automated, or didn't require any time from the team for this purpose the echoes/effort none label can now be used to exclude a code contribution from the efforts computation it will however continue to appear in your listings, and contribute to other computations such as the dora shortcut label cascading labels added to a shortcut epic now automatically cascade down to all github pull requests and gitlab merge requests referencing the epic through stories links this is particularly useful for new users who want the ability to categorize the history with as few manual actions as possible september jira labeling behavior we have clarified our labeling automations with jira to minimize confusion in particular, newly opened tickets will not get the value of their "echoes intent" custom field automatically set based on their parent's this created confusion, especially as a ticket got removed from an epic or moved to a different epic, but kept the value of its "intent" field this change is not expected to have any impact for our users github pull requests and gitlab merge requests referencing tickets continue to get their label automatically set based on the "echoes intent" field of the ticket they reference, and any of its parents see the jira docid 894ilvdbdj3sdmgz0hm3i page for more details pull requests insights auto expiration some insights are time sensitive, in particular those that directly apply to a particular pull request (for example to alert that it is stuck in review) these insights would remain open until they expired after 14 days, or needed to be manually dismissed insights linked to a particular pull request will now automatically expire when that pull request gets merged or closed, to save you a few clicks august \[beta] initiative aggregated status a refreshed initiatives docid\ auolbydwwbaqfuxrazrpx report now presents an aggregated status for the project, based on all identified risks \[insight] an initiative won't be completed on time this new insight alerts when an initiatives docid\ auolbydwwbaqfuxrazrpx estimated time of completion is beyond its configured target completion date this computation is based on the current pace of progress (i e , completion of its scope as captured through issues across integrations) \[insight] progress on an initiative is slowing down this new insight alerts when progress on an initiatives docid\ auolbydwwbaqfuxrazrpx is slowing down, i e when our pace or progress is falling behind the estimated forecast \[insight] initiative scope grows faster than its completion this new insight alerts when the scope of an initiatives docid\ auolbydwwbaqfuxrazrpx grows faster than its completion this insight can detect situations where we are making progress, yet the target keeps moving further improved initiatives forecast we have upgraded our engine to forecast the completion of initiatives this vastly improved model now feeds into several new insights june linear publication filter add the ability to publish categories and initiatives to specific linear teams learn more about this feature in scoped publication docid\ ydhbuef7ei1ns6pv3flvi exclude zeros from slack and teams weekly reports the weekly slack and microsoft teams allocation reports now excludes lines without any activity to accomodate for users with a high number of categories of work, but with teams that only contribute to a handful of them all may \[beta] microsoft teams support echoes is now supporting microsoft teams to send weekly, daily and insights reports! weekly report weekly report in microsoft teams this feature is an early release and currently in beta reach out if you'd like to start using it for your organization! \[metrics] per repository allocation echoes now provide a new raw metrics to expose (development) effort allocations on a per repository basis the same metrics also allows combining other breakdowns such as the github or gitlab labels hence complementing the dashboards you already get from echoes labels april insights report as echoes' catalog of insights grows, more of you have asked to understand which alerts are implemented but have not occured within their teams we reworked the insights reports in this direction, to present both the actions taken over the selected period, as well as the full catalog of insights along with the "hits" reference jira ticket through pr/mr body echoes will now inspect the body of github pull requests and gitlab merge requests to find a jira issue key when such link is found, it is used to automatically label the contribution based on the value of the "echoes intent" jira custom field, as well as in some metrics (e g , the lead time docid\ uaynegynbwb4hk1hajkfa ) this change comes in addition to the previously implemented jira guidelines to reference a ticket from a github pull request or a gitlab merge request referencing a jira ticket through the contribution's title, branch name, and commit message headline remains supported team report better dora display rework of the deployments frequency and change failure rate views for better introspection on the team report deployments frequency \[insight] high amount of context switch ad hoc requests, unclear requirements or scope creep can force developers to abruptly switch context this new insight analyzes the work from the team and pinpoints which contributions are subject to abnormal context switch \[insight] the allocation on maintenance is increasing high maintenance may be an indicator that some refactoring, technical or process improvement becomes necessary for the sustainability of services this new insight notifies you when a team's maintenance burden increases compared to its historical trend \[metrics] new metrics some metrics have been added to the "raw data" change failure count deployments count pickup time the delay between a github pull request or gitlab merge request being ready for review, and another member commenting or reviewing the code change march insight slack notifications stay on top of echoes insights with notifications directly into slack insight links to the underlying metrics insights are an opinionated analysis of one aspect of the team's activity in some cases, you may want to examine the underlying signal and understand its trajectory over time, or how it differs with other team more insights now link their underlying metric, so that you can dig into the data, freely change the filters or the timeframe, and compare teams note all inputs to our insights are currently exposed as standalone metrics if there's a metric you'd like to see added, please reach out \[insight] the number of in progress tasks is unusually high this new insight analyzes the number of in progress tasks for your team, and can alert when it's either abnormally high considering the number of contributors, or when it departs from the team's historical average \[insight] a contribution is slower than unusual this new insight analyzes individual github pull requests and gitlab merge requests to detect when the progress in any given phase of the development process is below the team's historical trend february slack exclude drafts from daily reports the daily slack report sends, on the team's channel, the list of github pull requests or gitlab merge requests grouped by status it is now possible to exclude draft items from thist list to reduce the length of the message this new option can be found in your team's integrations settings effort allocation computation change echoes is committed to give you the best insights and dashboards with a seamless experience we continuously assess how users integrate echoes in their workflow and how they interact with echoes features we are changing the default weight given to unlabelled github pull requests, or merge requests in gitlab starting february 20th 2024, github pull requests and gitlab merge requests will be considered "xs" rather than "m" by default no action is expected from existing users see feb 24 default weight change docid 8 7han mvlbg uosvcg69 for a full description of the change github checks reported status the github docid\ l8y6 9 zqvpalfmtw5bhy check for labels now reports success instead of "skipped" for situations where the pull request's author either doesn't belong to any team from echoes perspective, or belongs to a team where labels are not enforced this allows to enforce the labels checks through github branch protection rules , including on shared repositories where multiple teams with different label enforcement contribute january insights your mission as an engineering leader is to help your teams live up to their full potential our mission as a company is to support you in that complex, but fascinating, task today, we are taking a major step in this direction with the launch of echoes insights insights home echoes goes beyond data collection and reporting by analyzing your data for you, to become your engineering manager's copilot insights shines a light on the weak signals that may require your attention, such as a high amount of cross teams dependencies? a spike in the number of issues being filed on one of your team's projects? a team member who seems to be working an alarming number of consecutive days and a growing number of other signals to help you maximize your team's impact, sustainably example insight (1)example insight (2) this is an early release, and we have ambitious plans to enrich the catalog of insights in the upcoming months, in no small part based on your feedback! book time to discuss, or to let us know what you think via the feedback module in echoes low level metrics insights are a high level abstraction producing a summarized analysis of a combination of low level metrics echoes now exposes the catalog of low level metrics in order for you to better understand and explore the activity of your teams with this feature, echoes gives you access to three different layers of engineering data metrics , the low level measurements such as the allocation of efforts of one team against a particular category of work (e g , maintenance in the screenshot above) reports , which arrange topically connected metrics in a readily usable format insights , which find and surface the valuable signal from the sea of metrics archive changelog 2023 docid\ z5qj7ppxp0c 8ifrywv6e changelog 2022 docid\ gg5snpnxab8zsrrx4rj8c