Deep Dive: GitHub Report for DevOps Metrics

Today we’re releasing our next major update to the Software.com platform, including a new GitHub integration to help you visualize your team’s development speed and delivery frequency.

When you connect your organization’s GitHub, you’ll generate a free historical report of your team’s key DevOps metrics in less than 5 minutes. You will also be able to see how your organization's DevOps performance metrics compare to other companies in the market.

Our goal is to provide data, metrics, and automations that empower teams to continuously improve their organization’s developer experience and DevOps performance. With Software's insights, we believe teams can benefit from faster delivery speed, efficient delivery pipelines, and improved quality.

Key DevOps Metrics

Your GitHub report provides you with an overview of your DevOps performance—how your organization’s tools, workflows, and practices impact your team’s ability to deploy and ship code. 

First, we analyze your organization’s delivery frequency, including commit frequency and pull requests merged. 

Delivery frequency is a proxy for features shipped. High delivery frequency often indicates that your team is able to continuously integrate new code into the main branch, while low delivery frequency can indicate potential pain or friction when integrating code changes.

Commit frequency measures the average number of commits merged into the default branch per developer per day. Pull request frequency measures the average number of pull requests merged into the default branch per developer per day. 

Both delivery frequency and commit frequency can help you understand the flow of work throughout the development cycle. 

Next, we estimate your organization’s code volume by measuring lines of code merged. Lines of code represent the number of lines added and deleted in commits merged to the default branch per developer per day. 

Lines of code merged is just one measure of code volume. When compared with other metrics—such as lead time and commit frequency—you can get a clearer picture of the overall throughput of your engineering system.

Lastly, we generate a chart of your organization’s code throughput, which compares code volume and delivery frequency by repository. 

By comparing volume and frequency, you can identify high and low throughput repositories. When combined with context about each repository’s purpose, you can better understand if each repository’s code throughput matches your team’s expectations about delivery frequency and code volume. Code throughput will help you discover potential bottlenecks or friction in your team’s most active repositories.

Sharing Your Report

Once you generate your report, you can invite anyone on your team to view your organization's GitHub report. Sharing your report is optional and you will be able to see your full report before inviting any team members.

Simply copy the link in the footer and share in your team's Slack workspace, or add team members by email. When a team member visits your invite link, they will be asked to create a Software account. They will then be added to your organization automatically and will be able to explore your GitHub report.

Continuously Improving Daily Work

After generating your GitHub report, you’ll unlock access to continuously updating metrics about your organization's DevOps performance. You can learn more about your organization’s lead time, commit activity, and production throughput—refreshed daily in your team’s Production Throughput view. 

Over time, you’ll be able to see how your team is trending, as well as how your company ranks compared to global benchmarks.

For engineering teams striving to improve their daily work, Software’s continuous DevOps metrics provide an easy way to find your team’s development flow. We provide you with the insights and automations you need to eliminate bottlenecks and ship code like a world-class engineering team.

Data Privacy and Security

If you're concerned about data privacy, know that we are too!  We never share individual data, only anonymized team metrics. You can learn more about the data we collect by visiting our GitHub integration overview.

In short, we ask for permission to view repository contents, including commits, pull requests, and issues. We never read your code. 

We also ask for permission to view organization members and projects. We use membership information to help us better calculate team-level metrics. We’ll never contact your team members without your explicit permission. 

After the initial sync, our app subscribes to ongoing GitHub webhook events. Webhooks allow us to see your organization’s activity, including pushes, pull request reviews, pull request comments, and releases. 

How to Get Started

You can create an organization and integrate GitHub by heading over to the Production Throughput Explore and following the setup instructions. You can also view and install the Software app on the GitHub marketplace. 

Setup takes just a few minutes. Plus, it’s free forever, with the option to upgrade.

You’ll be guided through three steps required to generate your report. 

In the first step, provide a name for your organization. You can choose any name, but we suggest using your company name. You can always create sub-teams later with anyone in your organization. 

In the second step, you will need to install the Software GitHub App for one of your organizations. 

If your GitHub organization has app access restrictions enabled, an Owner or App Manager must connect GitHub. Third-party app restrictions are enabled by default for all new GitHub organizations. You can request approval from an organization admin by sending them an email through Software. In the emailed request, we provide background on Software, the data we collect, and how to enable the GitHub app.

In the last step, you can choose what repositories you want to add to your GitHub report. We only collect data about the repositories that you choose in this step.  

Once you connect, it will take about 5 minutes to process your data. When your data is done processing, you will get an email and an in-app notification that your report is ready.

Over the next few months, we’ll be adding new data sources and insights for you and your team. We’re excited to see how better visibility into DevOps performance can improve daily work for developers around the world. 

You can get your GitHub report by creating an organization on Software.com.