September Release Notes: New Technology and Behaviour Factors

September has been a big month at Umano, exciting new success factors to help teams make better decisions in their journey of continuous improvement.

What’s new

Factors to support best practice for code reviews and factors to encourage healthy team communication.

Previously we released Speed of Review, the two new factors as part of this release are creating a fuller picture of a team’s code review practices.

Detail of Pull Request
Detail of pull requests is a measure of the level of detail included when a pull request is created. Adding sufficient detail to a Pull Request creates context for the reviewer which will allow the reviewer to perform a better review.

Size of Pull Request
Size of pull requests is a measure of the size of a pull request including the number of files changed, as well as the number of lines changed within each file. Small pull requests are easier to review, making it more likely for the code to be thoroughly reviewed before approval. Large pull requests tend to be glazed over and rubber stamped and not reflective of mature practice.

With the release of these two new factors, we’ve moved Speed of Review into Technology, grouping all of the factors relating to code reviews in one convenient place.

The article “The case for improving communication” introduced the new behavioural success factors and the pivotable role communication plays towards a team’s success. Balance, Readability, and Responsiveness of communication are in Umano today creating new insights for teams to work with.

Balance of Communication

The importance of team communication can’t be understated – good communication encourages team input, strengthens relationships with coworkers, creates common understanding amongst team members, and produces team members who feel appreciated and respected. Balance of Communication gives insight into how team members are contributing to the team’s communication, making a difficult conversation if this is not the case easier and, most important data informed.

Readability of Communication
Following the renowned Gunning Fog Index, Umano has developed Readability of Communication. The Gunning Fog Index has been tailored to reflect specialised engineering and technology jargon, and will become more accurate over time as it learns the common language used in your company.

Responsiveness of Communication
Keeping momentum is key whilst working in sprints. The responsiveness factor measures the time between questions and answers within the used tools. All questions that answered within the day will receive a perfect Responsiveness of Communication score.

Project based teams and Service teams

As part of our latest model enhancements the models are more specific to accomodate deeper insights. We have started this by focussing on projects using agile scrum. Teams that don’t use Jira Agile Scrum will still see their teams behavioural and technology practises.

Fixed!

In most cases projects will be inactive over the weekend. This inactivity resulted in a error within the Snapshot view for Mondays. Getting started on a Monday isn’t always easy, but we’ve resolved this to help your team get up and running for the week.

What’s next

We will be rolling out three new Behavioural success factors in the coming three weeks. Keep an eye on our blog, or subscribe to our mailing list if you want to know what is coming.

We’d love to hear which success factors are important for your software development team – email matt@umano.tech for more details.