If you’re an existing GitLab customer, you’re probably always looking for ways to make your GitLab workflow smoother and more efficient. If that’s you, look no further than the newly released GitLab Value Streams Dashboard. This new feature gives you a view of your entire development process, so you can keep track of progress and find problems quickly and easily. With the Value Streams Dashboard, teams can make better decisions, save time and money, and improve overall software quality.
Read on to learn more about the features and benefits of GitLab’s Value streams dashboards
What are Value streams dashboards?
Value streams dashboards are a new feature launched by GitLab to help teams visualize and optimize their software delivery process. These dashboards will provide a high-level view of the value stream, showing how value flows through the software delivery process. It will also allow teams to easily identify bottlenecks and inefficiencies.Â
Value stream dashboards will enable teams to track key metrics such as deployment frequency, lead time for changes, and time to restore service. Being able to track such metrics will offer a better understanding of the delivery process and allow you to identify areas for improvement. With value stream dashboards, teams can collaborate more effectively, improve project visibility, and deliver value to end-users more quickly and reliably.
Source: GitLab
Value streams dashboard metrics
- Deployment frequency: Tracks the average number of daily deployments to production, measured with GitLab’s Deployment Frequency tab, important for optimizing the release process and shortening the feedback cycle.
- Lead time for changes: Tracks the time to successfully deliver a commit into production. It’s, important for improving the efficiency of CI/CD pipelines and reducing time to market.
- Time to restore service: Tracks the time it takes to recover from a failure in production is critical for improving system reliability and reducing the impact on end-users.
- Change failure rate: Tracks the percentage of deployments that cause an incident in production used for improving release quality and reducing the risk of incidents.
- VSA Lead time: Tracks the median time from issue created to issue closed, which helps improve issue management efficiency and reduce time to market.
- VSA Cycle time: Tracks the median time from the earliest commit of the linked issue’s merge request to when the issue is closed. This metric is important for improving development efficiency and reducing time to market.
- New issues: Tracks the number of new issues created and is useful for improving issue management efficiency and software quality.
Features of Github’s value streams dashboards
GitHub’s value streams dashboard provides various features that make it a powerful tool for managing software development processes. Some of the notable features of the dashboard include:
Implementation of Auto DevOps:
The implementation of Auto DevOps is one of the most notable features of GitHub’s value streams dashboard. Auto DevOps is a set of tools and practices that automate the software delivery process with which teams can configure their pipelines to automatically build, test, and deploy their code changes. This reduces the time and effort required to release new features and fixes.
Code Review Dashboard:
Code review is an essential process in software development that helps ensure code quality and maintainability. GitHub’s value streams dashboard provides a comprehensive view of the code review process, enabling teams to track the progress of code reviews and identify any bottlenecks. The code review dashboard provides insights into the number of pull requests, review comments, and approvals. This helps teams to identify areas for improvement in the code review process.
Built-in Load Testing Tool:
The dashboard comes with a built-in load-testing tool that enables teams to test the performance of their applications under different loads. Load testing helps teams to identify performance bottlenecks and optimize their applications for better performance. The load testing tool provides insights into the application’s response time, throughput, and error rate under different loads.
Benefits of the value streams dashboard
The value streams dashboard provides various benefits to software development teams. Some of the notable benefits include:
Improving Team Collaboration
The value streams dashboard enables team members to visualize the progress of the software development process, facilitating communication and collaboration among team members. The dashboard provides a shared view of the software development process, enabling team members to understand the status of the project and their role in it. This helps reduce communication gaps and ensures everyone is aligned with the project goals.
Identifying Bottlenecks
Value stream dashboards can help identify bottlenecks in the software development process. By visualizing the flow of work from idea to delivery, teams can identify where work is getting stuck or taking longer than expected. The dashboard can highlight areas of the process where improvements can be made, such as reducing wait times between stages or addressing issues with specific team members or tools. By identifying and addressing bottlenecks, teams can improve efficiency and speed up customer value delivery.
Enhancing Project Visibility
Value stream dashboards enhance project visibility by providing real-time visibility into the performance of the software delivery pipeline, allowing teams to identify areas for improvement, track progress, and make informed decisions about process improvements. This leads to faster delivery of high-quality software and promotes accountability and ownership among team members.
Conclusion
The value streams dashboard is a powerful tool that enables software development teams to track and optimize their software development processes. GitHub’s value streams dashboard provides various features that make it an effective tool for managing software development projects. By using the dashboard, teams can improve collaboration, identify bottlenecks, and enhance project visibility, resulting in faster delivery of high-quality software.
