Notifications are the cornerstone for how GitClear helps busy engineering leaders keep abreast of the most critical issues afflicting their teams on any given week.
Topics covered in this page:
linkDefault Notification Setup
Most notifications in GitClear are generated by the "Team Goals" that you pick.
As shown in GitClear's Team Goals Documentation, there are around 50 different metrics that can be monitored on your behalf. When you choose a team goal (via Highlights => Goal Setup), GitClear lets you pick a "notification threshold," relative to industry benchmarks, for each.
With such high optionality, it can be exhausting to actually review and choose from so many different goals offered by GitClear.
That's why, when you visit the "Goal Setup" page, we allow you to change your default role. Picking the most relevant job role will automatically tailor GitClear's recommended goals to the ones usually picked by people with your role. So be sure you've picked the most relevant role before you begin sifting through possible team goals.
linkHow Goals Become Notifications
When you enable a goal on the Goal Setup page, you'll be prompted to choose how often you want to be notified (every time the goal is violated? Once per week if the average is off-track? Once per quarter?).
You'll also pick the threshold for notification. We have collected the industry averages for metrics like "Average business hours between opened PR and first review time," so you can just choose whether you want to be "on par" with industry average, more aggressive, or less aggressive in when you're notified.
linkFine-tune Notification Preferences (configure which notifications are shown)
After you have chosen team goals that reflect your priorities, those goals will begin showing up in the list of "Resource Notifications" that is shown upon clicking the main "Highlights" tab.
For each notification on the team, you control what happens when a notification is generated:
Here is a screenshot of where you click to update your notification preferences.
Note that "Dashboard" means you will only see the notification when you happen to log in to GitClear. We usually recommend this setting only for notifications that are the lowest priority.
linkViewing Resource Notifications
If you configured a notification to be delivered to Slack or Email, you will see the notification sent to that channel.
In addition to these channels, you can always view a team's notifications on GitClear. All recent notifications can be found on the Highlights page, and also embedded in the reports themselves (see "Embedded Notifications," below).
Viewing recent notifications for the team & resource selected atop the page
linkViewing Goal Notifications with Charts
Within the main "Highlights" tab, there is a sub-tab called "Goals" that will let you see a collection of graphs that illustrate your team's performance on the goals you picked.
For goals that have a visual component, the "Highlights" => "Goals" tab lets you see trends
At the bottom of the page, you can also find details on how the team has historically performed on each of the goals selected.
linkEmbedded Notifications
You can also view Resource Notifications inline, alongside the report they are relevant to. This is useful, since it allows you to start learning what threshold constitutes a "normal" value for charts, vs what values are atypical.
When there are unread notifications associated with a report, you'll see a clickable bell icon with an orange circle. If you click on this inline notifications invocation icon, you can see a sorted list of which notifications are pertinent to the report, team and time frame selected:
Most reports on GitClear contain an icon to the right of the report title that indicates whether there are relevant notifications pending
Note that all Resource Notifications are specific to teams, so if you are curious to see what notifications may have been triggered for a particular individual, ensure that individual exists as a committer on the team you have selected.
linkMarking Notifications "Viewed" En Masse
You can click the notifications individually, or select them en masse:
We then make it easy to unsubscribe or mark as reviewed in one fell swoop. Each notification has a link to be able to review its content in more detail. Also, if you want to unsubscribe from all notifications at once, you can do that via the "Unsubscribe" link at the bottom of the email. No login required for unsubscribe.
linkNon-Goal Resource Notifications
As previously mentioned, most types of notifications are based on the Team Goals that you set up. However, there are a few extra types of notifications that work alongside the goals system. You can enable or disable these notifications to your preference.
linkTeam-specific goals
The main source of notifications are the team-specific goals that a manager chooses. You can read about setting up goals in GitClear on this page -- there are more than 50 types of goals that can be chosen for a team.
linkImpact fluctuation
When a developer's last week is under the 20th percentile, or above the 80th percentile, among their past year's worth of weekly Diff Delta values. We might tune this down to 10 or 90 percentiles if it proves too noisy.
linkSignificant documentation, test, or deleted code
Tests, documentation, and deleted code form the holy trinity of tech debt minimization and reduction. To ensure that managers recognize when devs on their team are making contributions in the top ten percentile of these valuable domains, we will by default notify Lead Developers and Managers if one of their developers is carrying the team's load in any of these key domains.
linkStory point fluctuation
When a ticket has accumulated 50% more Diff Delta than would be predicted by the number of Story Points assigned to its Jira ticket. Only active after specifying a Jira column used for Story Points.
linkNew domain expert
Triggered on the first month a developer illustrates proficiency in a new-to-them code domain, while also accumulating a significant amount of overall Diff Delta (2 days' worth of work) in the domain
linkHigh unplanned work
Silent, unplanned work is one of the biggest killers of progress toward the company's roadmap. There are a plethora of reasons that developers can get sucked into working on tasks that were not on the original roadmap. Managers or Lead Developers that want to get the story on what is sidetracking feature development can subscribe to this notification.
linkRising bug work
Weekly or monthly Diff Delta dedicated to fixing tickets marked as 'Bug' in Jira was more than half of all Diff Delta accumulated
linkLanguishing pull request
Triggered on any of the following: (A) PR was opened 4 or more days ago without a comment (B) PR has been open 2 weeks without being merged (C) More than 50% of the work in the PR has taken place after the PR was opened (indicates high degree of rework)