By constantly paying down our tech debt, GitClear progress remains brisk even as we enter Year 5 of building this product. Here’s what we’ve been working on lately:
linkBetter 500+ developer experience
GitClear’s new team options let us cater to a wide range of team sizes. Sometimes we help 2 dev teams, most often it’s 10-50 dev teams, but there are no shortage of 500-5,000 developer teams interested in GitClear’s reporting. The reports shown to a VP Engineering in a small org, or a 1,000 dev org, are pretty different. So we’ve leaned heavy on improvements to the many-repo, many-team GitClear experience:
linkFilter on repo path in browse list
linkPaginated/searchable resource selector
We now load the resource selector asynchronously to speed up page loads for entities with more than 50 repos. We're also adding the ability to quickly filter on a particular repo or organization.
linkPaginated/searchable team editing
Finding and navigating through teams is now optimized for companies with hundreds of teams.
linkFiltering on Tech Debt Browser (and normal Directory Browser)
Our Directory Browsing tools are essential for getting up to speed quickly in a new environment. But historically there has been a lot of clicking involved to sift down to the best stuff. With new Directory Browse filters, you can cut out the busywork and focus on files that were slow to change for more than a given threshold:
Viewing Tech Debt Inspector filtering only directories that have received at least 5 hours of work over the selected time interval
It is also now possible to adjust the minutes estimate for a commit from within the Directory Browser. Just click into a file, then click the "Minutes Used" estimate:
When clicking into a file, you can now edit the time estimate inline (in addition to being able to revise minutes estimate through the diff viewer)
This ought to make it significantly more handy to amend potentially inaccurate minute estimates so you can quickly whittle down on the directories that have been uniquely slow.
linkNew per-file line count and complexity
When you're trying to understand why a certain file has accumulated tech debt, it's useful to visualize how its size and complexity have been changing over time. That data is now presented inline any time you click a file in Directory Browser.
linkChart Glimpse refinements
The opportunity is ripe for some Github Sponsors member, or a solo dev that shepherded an open source project, or anyone, to get more transparent about what they’re working on while saving the time spent writing. As of today, Chart Glimpses can let you show off
How much change your repos are seeing lately?
How much work is tickets vs not?
When are deploys happening, and when do devs seem to be stuck?
If you have a Github profile, these charts can spice those up. But more likely, you are a Senior Dev or Manager that needs to relay status as time-efficiently as possible. Chart Glimpse is made for you, time-efficient information disseminator!
Lots of options for building a Github Profile status profile to your tastes
A live demo of the "Publish Everything" mode awaits at our homepage, Alloy.dev.
linkEasy Jira connections
Connecting to Jira used to require reading a page of instructions. Now it’s a single button press to initiate an Oauth confirmation:
Click "Accept" and you're off to the races with commit/PR/issue syncing. ✨
linkNew graphs: repo, committer count
Get em while they're hot at a "Velocity" page near you.
linkAnd more
A few more improvements gone live since the last post:
Improvements to SAML based login, including more clearly documenting the Enterprise setup process
Lots more options to grant data access, as described at the newly minted help page
Slightly more than 1.2m more data points added to the set of Industry Stats, for more accurate comparison with comp companies
Launched v6 GitClear homepage, with some ✨✨✨ for good measure. Check it out sometime if you're in the neighborhood? Would love to hear opinions on it if anybody has them? 😉
linkComing soon
Biggest improvements in the works for the coming quarter:
Improved Highlights Tab experience. Showcase the coolest self-selected achievements from the team over the past X time units.
Paginated/Searchable Team Switcher. A conspicuous holdout from the parade of Enterprise improvements is the Team Switcher. It won't last.
Code Review vNext. Our entire team relies on Commit Activity Browser daily, because being able to speed-read code lets us spend most of our time on making contributions. It's not hard to imagine a world where PR review on GitClear benefits any who try it. Seems as good a target as any to set for the Q3/Q4 blog post? 😉
In the meantime, don't wait for the next blog to get posted. Just visit the blog index page and tune in to what GitClear is working on via the Chart Glimpse now live.