Chart Glimpse images open a window from your dev team to the rest of the world. Usually development work happens in a "black box" where even the project managers struggle at times to know what tickets their team is focused on. Chart Glimpses create transparency across an organization, even optionally allowing customers or vendors to get in on the excitement of watching a feature come together.
linkConcept
Many companies, especially those in the "startup" or "mid-sized" tiers, know the struggle of trying to keep customers, executives, and third-parties in the loop on what features and bug fixes the dev team has been working on lately. With training, an executive could visit Jira or the Github's commit list to get a vague sense for what their team has been spending time on lately. But wouldn't it be better if the developers themselves could be responsible for updating stakeholders on their progress? That's what Chart Glimpse images make possible
Chart Glimpse images are constructed using a pseudonymous URL that includes a secure UUID. You can read more about these in the "Security" section below.
You can post Chart Glimpse images anywhere an image can be posted! You might find value posting your published Chart Glimpse to places like...
Your website home page or change log page
Email (to a manager, CEO, or non-GitClear developer)
Company stats/reporting dashboard
Slack or your preferred work chat app
Note taking or to-do app where you collaborate with coworkers/vendors
Google Slides or Powerpoint deck
Your Twitter stream, or a pinned tweet
Anywhere that people might want to see what's new in the land of devs can be a good place to drop a Chart Glimpse image.
linkPicking Chart Glimpse Parameters
There are a multitude of different chart types that can published as Chart Glimpse images. The first step to publishing a Chart Glimpse is to click on the Chart Glimpse icon once you have chosen the resource, team, date range, and optionally, committer, that you'd like the Chart Glimpse to feature:
Choosing the parameters for a Chart Glimpse that will publish a Historical Diff Delta by Repo chart for the past year in the Alloy entity showing work from committers on the "Alloy Developers" team
Once you've clicked the Chart Glimpse icon these five parameters will be locked in place, so consider your desired combination of parameters before proceeding.
When you are creating a Chart Glimpse for the Commit Activity Browser, you won't need to worry about the date range, since the Commit Activity Browser automatically selects an appropriate date range (usually 3-7 days) based on the amount of recent activity.
linkConfigure Chart Glimpse to Publish
Upon clicking the Chart Glimpse icon, you'll be taken to a page that lets you configure the specifics of what you want to publish:
Myriad of options available when publishing a Chart Glimpse
Until you hit "Publish Chart," the chart will not be visible except in your preview window. The entries shown in the Work Log (when enabled) will choose from among all of your tickets and commits in the time range, but once your Chart Glimpse is published, only the issues and commits that are explicitly opted-in will be shown.
linkOption: Chart to Show
There are several types of charts that can be published. They fall in to three categories:
Commit Activity Browser charts. This is the Commit Activity Browser users know and love, but as an exported image, where the coloring of the bubbles is dictated by the specific type of CAB chosen. Unlike the Diff Delta and the Issue-based Chart Glimpses, the Commit Activity Browser will only show issues and commits that were undertaken in the previous few days (example). These charts are ideal for sharing with customers and vendors to let them see what's coming down the pipe.
Diff Delta Velocity Segment charts. The set of charts shown under the "Velocity" tab are available to be published such that managers can see how much progress is occurring by repo, by code operation, or by code provenance.
Issue Tracker Progress charts. For those who want to answer questions like "how is our breakdown of features vs. bugs changing over time?" or "how is our Story Point velocity tracking compared to last year?" These charts native habitat is the "Issues & Defects" tab. To use these charts requires setting up issue tracking.
linkOption: Work Log
The "Top projects underway" section of the screenshots above is known as the "Work Log." You can read more about how to publish to the Work Log here. When viewing the preview image, all commits and issues in the time range will be eligible to be shown in the Work Log, but once your chart has been activated (so it is visible to those who have the pseudonymous image URL), only published commits or issues will be shown.
All Work Log activity is sorted by the work with the greatest Diff Delta over the time Chart Glimpse time period. Depending on the length of Work Log chosen ("short" is five entries, "medium" is 10 and "long" is 20), you'll see 5-20 of the largest commits and issues via the Work Log.
linkOption: Color Scheme
It's what it sounds like.
linkOption: Desired width
Controls the width of the image to be generated. The height of the image is dictated primarily by the Work Log length.
linkAdvanced Options
The Anonymize Committers option swaps out your developers' avatars on the Commit Activity Browser with autogenerated avatars. None of the velocity-based charts contain any information that could be used to identify committers. If you are sharing your Chart Glimpse with external stakeholders or the general public, it's usually best to use the "Anonymize committers" in case there are developers on your team who prefer not to have their avatar seen by the customer base.
The Freshen Chart Automatically box controls whether the chart will dynamically update over time. Dynamically updating charts refresh their content at a rate relative to the type of GitClear subscription (from one hour to three days), so that they can be a continuous source of status. When the box is unchecked, it lets you save a particular moment in history that you might want to refer back to later.
linkPublishing a Chart Glimpse
Once you click the "Publish Chart" button on the Chart Configuration page, we will purge the preview image (which contains commits and issues that haven't been published) and kickoff generation a new Chart Glimpse that will reside at a static URL and automatically update. When your chart is in the process of being generated, a placeholder image will be shown in your list of Chart Glimpses (Settings -> Account -> Chart Glimpses). It will look something like this:
Upon publishing a Chart Glimpse, it takes a minute to generate your final image
After refreshing the page, you'll get buttons to copy an image URL or an HTML element:
After your image has generated, copy the image src or HTML
The image URL is useful if you want provide an src attribute to an img attribute you have on a page. If you don't yet have an image element, you can click "Copy HTML element" and you'll get something like this:
linkChart Glimpse Security
Chart Glimpses are obfuscated using a pseudonymous UIUD. Read here to learn more about the anonymity afforded by a UUID, the short version is that "If you can generate one billion GUIDs per second, it would still take 36 years to have a 1.95e-03 chance of a collision."
Still, a published Chart Glimpse can be seen by whoever gets ahold of the URL, so you will want to remain considerate of which charts will be published to the extent that the progress of your development efforts is considered a sensitive subject.
When publishing a Commit Activity Browser chart, we recommend considering the "Anonymize committers" checkbox to hide the avatars for your developers.