Trends
Trends puts your historical activity data to work for you. As you complete tasks and objectives, Trends illuminates how engineering productivity is changing over time for virtually any body of work.
By surfacing period-over-period changes, alongside benchmarking to historical averages, you can see at a glance what’s improving and what may need attention. The aim of Trends is to use data to answer questions that are hard to answer—otherwise involving lots of digging and manual compilation—or that aren’t answerable at all.
Using Trends
The overview page of Trends provides an end-to-end view of engineering productivity. The idea is simple. Engineering’s job is to turn ideas into working software. If we get a lot done, well and at good speed, we know—and can show—that we’re doing our job.
Across the top we show:
The amount of new work demand;
The average speed at which that work is completed (i.e. cycle time);
The total amount of work delivered (i.e. throughput).
For each of these primary areas we provide correlated metrics. For example, speed is clearly informed by how efficiently we’re working. For tasks that involve code, speed is also informed by merge time.
Click any metric for a more detail breakdown, including all tasks involved in the analysis.
Trends analysis for any body of work
You can analyze productivity trends for any body of work. At the top of the page you can set:
Tasks or objectives: the metrics change based on your chosen unit of work.
Timeframe: see how your productivity metrics compare period over period, for any period you set.
Additional filter criteria: choose from a range of options to further refine your analysis. For instance, you might want to see Trends data for last quarter for defect work only.
Each work entity in Socratic (plans, objectives, workstreams, views, etc.) also has an accompanying tab showing Trends specific to the entity. So, for example, if you want to see how a particular objective is progressing, click the Trends tab for a full analysis.
Note that any archived work is not counted in Trends.
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