17 Oct, 2024
Offering a New Way to Improve Software Deployment Cycle for Azure DevOps Teams
Valven Atlas aims to improve all steps in the software development lifecycle. Our vision of helping the software development ecosystem to grow together drives us to include new insights, new actions, and new integrations every day to reach more teams and have a bigger impact on the way the world is shaped. ​
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Through this idea, we are happy to announce that Valven Atlas benefits provided with the integration of Microsoft Azure DevOps for the development behaviors and insights now extended to deployment actions to improve the efficiency of the deployment cycle and its impact on the whole software development lifecycle.​
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Azure DevOps teams can now use DORA Metrics and correlate the deployment metrics with development insights. This will enable teams to identify the bottlenecks faster and take precise actions to eliminate gaps eventually leading to faster releases with a minimum risk in production.
As a Microsoft Azure DevOps using team, you can easily integrate your Valven Atlas account to enhance your CI/CD flow and empower the deployment process to reach your potential.
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You can check our blog post on DORA metrics to understand how deployment behavior analysis and tracking DORA metrics can benefit your deployment cycle.
Improving the Software Development Quality with a Better Behavior Analysis
One of the crucial aspects of the software development lifecycle is the behavioral patterns that define the transitions between the submitter who executes the development and the reviewer who ensures the quality of the development.
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Valven Atlas now supports defining an approval threshold for teams that want to ensure the quality of the software developments. When there is a process of approval from a defined number of reviewers for a pull request, it is also a good idea to track the time to reach the desired approval count. ​
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This is why we also added a new report to reflect the time to reach the number of approvals for pull requests to give the teams a way to understand if the execution matches the goal and what is the impact of reaching the threshold to the software development process.​​​​​
12 Aug, 2024
Empowering Azure DevOps Teams in the Software Development
Valven Atlas is known for making software development teams' processes easier by increasing the visibility in the engineering steps, enabling accurate resource management with data, ensuring the alignment between the company's target and the execution, generating actionable insights to create the most productive environment, and many more.
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We are constantly expanding the integrations with Git providers and other tools to support different teams using various solutions to manage their software development process.
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In this release, we are happy to include Azure DevOps to introduce Valven Atlas benefits to teams utilizing Azure DevOps. Visionary teams that aim for excellence in their development and deployment cycle can now use Valven Atlas to improve their ability to release updates while minimizing inefficiencies and bottlenecks.​​
As an Azure DevOps user, you are one step away from improving your development cycle by using Valven Atlas. Learn how you can activate the communication between your Valven Atlas and Azure DevOps accounts.
New Horizons Through Deployment Metrics with Direct Integrations to CI/CD Tools
We are excited to introduce the new Valven Atlas integrations which will take the value provided by Valven Atlas to the next level by combining the development analysis with deployment actions.
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Valven Atlas now supports some of the widely used CI/CD tools to get the daily deployment actions and provide crucial information and guidance to improve the deployment cycle to achieve excellence.
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Three integrations in one product release update;
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Jenkins
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CircleCI
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Travis CI
Valven Atlas integration with CI/CD actions and deployments has a major impact on how we present DORA metrics. Without an integration to CI/CD tools, teams should identify the merges that need to be considered as releases manually.
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With these powerful new integrations, a wide range of software development teams will be able to analyze deployment behaviors precisely, identify the issues and causes of faulty releases, and measure the effort to recover from these faulty releases to manage their limited resources efficiently.
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As a user in one of the supported tools, you are one step away from improving your deployment efficiency with research-based DORA metrics, revealing missing areas in your CI/CD processes, and improving your performance that will lead your company to beat the competition using Valven Atlas.
Check the Valven Atlas integration details for your respective CI/CD tool to empower your deployment process;
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If you need any information regarding how you can benefit from DORA metrics and improve your deployment actions, you can check out our blog post on DORA metrics.
20 May, 2024
Predictive Insights into Sprint Cycle Through Power of AI
With Valven Atlas' latest enhancement, we aim to help your software development teams take control of their sprint cycle, reduce the risk of delays and delivery penalties, and ship new features even faster! Introducing our Forecast Analysis, now integrated into the Valven Atlas burndown chart under Sprints.
With this powerful new feature, you can:
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Track Progress More Accurately: By analyzing your sprint data to provide a forecast of the current project’s completion to enable team leaders to anticipate potential delays and adjust the plans accordingly.
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Proactive Decision-Making: By seeing a projection of your sprint's progress, you can take necessary actions before issues have a bigger impact on the organization and business, ensuring your team stays on track and meets deadlines.
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Tailored Analysis for Teams and Projects: Our AI and ML algorithms analyze your sprint data to offer a customized forecast of your project’s completion. This adaptive analysis based on the changing conditions provides more value with better results.
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Enhanced Visibility: The forecast analysis offers a visual representation of expected progress, making it easier for you to communicate with stakeholders and manage expectations.
Here’s what the updated burndown chart looks like with the forecast analysis:
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We strongly believe this new feature will significantly enhance your sprint planning and execution, providing deeper insights and helping your team stay ahead of the curve while enabling you to eliminate any inefficiencies and delays that would impact the business success of the entire organization.
Advanced Pull Request Filters Highlight Missing Steps
Valven Atlas offers detailed pull request analysis that can be differentiated for projects, repositories, and teams. In addition to this, Valven Atlas also offers AI-powered insights to increase visibility into the development behaviors that can result in issues such as skipping the review cycle or poorly handled pull requests with insufficient time.
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Such pull requests that highlight the teams' strengths and weaknesses were visible through only provided insights. With this release update advanced filters to evaluate various types of pull requests can be analyzed separately on top of the existing project, repository, teams, and time filters.
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The related advanced filters can be categorized as below;
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In-Progress
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Merged
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Waiting
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Declined
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Merged with Approval
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Merged without Approval
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Handled On-Time
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Handled Late
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Merged Too Fast
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Merged by Submitter
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Without Reviewer Comment
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Has Follow-on Commits
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Through advanced filters on pull requests, team leaders would identify the issues in the development and review steps and can establish an effective company culture to follow the best practices in the software development lifecycle.
Linear Cycles Support
While extending our capabilities in sprint analysis, we also covered teams utilizing Linear for their issue management process.
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Linear offers Cycles to meet the requirements of the teams managing their SDLC through sprints and with the new release update, Valven Atlas also provides the Sprint analysis including the burndown chart, cumulative flow diagram, and backlog details for the Linear teams.
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Valven Atlas forecast will also be available via Linear Cycle support. Therefore Linear using teams will be able to use the sprint analysis and insights in full extent.
02 February, 2024
Effective Alignment With Automated Developer Merge Suggestions
In the code version control solutions user emails or user names can be registered differently either because of small changes in the information or domain changes of the organization.
Since Valven Atlas collects information from the version control software each individual with different information is evaluated separately. This situation can create confusion in the behavioral analysis and insights offered by Valven Atlas. This also has an impact on the licensing architecture which is based on the number of contributors.
In order to resolve this issue Valven Atlas offers a developer management feature that enables users to merge such multiplied developers so that analysis can run for each individual and actions they take.
Going through all cases separately can be time-consuming work for managers and it is open to errors so we are introducing smart developer suggestions to collect similar IDs or email addresses and summarize potential multiplied developers that may require merging.
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The last decision is left to the manager to eliminate unwanted merges and misleading analysis in the meantime, we aim to automate the flow as much as possible so that our customers can activate Valven Atlas with a minimum operational effort and get the best out of Valven Atlas capabilities without any confusion or risk.
The developer suggestions are presented when our users open the merge developer option from the Developers page in Valven Atlas. You can check our guide to deep dive on how to use the Developer Management Actions.
Introducing Valven Atlas Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) to Elevate Your Security
In our commitment to fortify Valven Atlas account security, we are thrilled to announce the rollout of a robust Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) feature.
Now you can add an extra layer of security beyond your password. Instead of only depending on your password for your account authentication, you can also enable a one-time authentication code to be delivered to your email address. This dynamic duo ensures that even if your password is compromised, your account remains impenetrable without the second authentication factor.
Valven Atlas now supports Slack to have a more flexible and efficient way to notify the users so that the product managers and team leads would not miss a beat in their development and deployment cycles.
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We strongly recommend using 2FA for your Valven Atlas account. You can check the details in our guide where we explain how you can enable this feature and other details.
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At Valven Atlas, we believe that your product experience should be both seamless and secure. The introduction of Two-Factor Authentication is a testament to our commitment to protecting your data.
06 December, 2023
GitHub Enterprise Support to Amplify Development Insights
GitHub Enterprise is used widely for the larger software development teams who prioritize security measures by hosting the solution on their on-premises.
The integration to Git Management systems is one of the integral parts of Valven Atlas to provide visibility for the development cycle details and highlight the areas where software developments can improve.
We now support GitHub Enterprise for these teams to fully utilize Valven Atlas functionalities, improve their efficiency in software development, and become better at shipping new features with minimum risk.
Valven Atlas users can now integrate their GitHub Enterprise account to increase visibility on your teams' development behaviors.
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More Options to Keep Everything Under Control
Slack is a widely used team collaboration tool that can improve alignment among an organization's teams and individuals. Additionally, it can also be used to trigger alerts in cases like getting important emails or any other means.
There are ways Valven Atlas users can get email notifications when a condition they set related to commits, pull requests, review processes, issues, sprints, projects, and more to identify the root causes and take swift actions to eliminate delays or define actions.
Valven Atlas now supports Slack to have a more flexible and efficient way to notify the users so that the product managers and team leads would not miss a beat in their development and deployment cycles.
Valven Atlas users can now integrate Slack with a couple of simple steps to be always up to date regarding the actions taken in the development process.
DORA Metrics Recover Branch Support
In DORA metrics, there are some insights that measure the team deployment performance for recovery actions.
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Valven Atlas enables ways to identify recovery releases including giving names to issues and pull requests.
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In this release update, a new way to identify the recovery releases is introduced to provide more flexibility and cover possible needs. A destination branch name can be provided to identify if the release is a recovery release so that Valven Atlas can run the analysis accordingly.
02 November, 2023
Time In State Report To Improve Visibility
This is an introduction to a new feature that will empower the development cycles of software development teams benefiting from Valven Atlas. One of the main goals we always keep in mind in developing Valven Atlas is to increase visibility for the teams so that they can analyze the behaviors and find the areas that they can improve. With this idea in mind, we are proud to add a new feature that will x-ray the whole process with the data collected from the Jira Issue Management tool to detail each step from the issue opening phase to production.
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How to use Time In State Report?
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Since each development team can have different steps and stages on its way to production, teams should be able to define the steps and the architecture of their cycle to get the best out of Valven Atlas Time In State.​
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The issue states and development steps can be defined on the configurations page to correctly reflect the real architecture.
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With each status used by the company that is associated with the predefined Valven Atlas statuses, Valven Atlas takes a historical approach to check all the issues and the related actions in status changes and generate an overview of progress by analyzing the development behaviors.
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What Time In State Offers To Improve Development Process​
Moving from the basic statuses and behavioral analysis for each status to the detailed mapping of customized development flow will allow teams to have more visibility into the whole process from issue creation to production.
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The time spent on each status both in real-time and in historical overview will enable teams to address the missing parts and behavioral changes that may point to the root cause of delays and failures. The teams benefiting from the increased visibility and using the opportunity to address problems can take the necessary actions to resolve issues and significantly improve their ability to ship new features and products.
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Our approach also enables us to analyze the data from the beginning and offers development teams a way to check seasonal changes, the effects of any strategic changes, or the impact of new hiring and a way to make comparisons with the current and past based on the behavioral approaches.
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This feature is a great representation of our passion for helping development teams monitor their cycle and maximize the efficiency to work better. ​
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We are working each day to bring new insights and game-changing features that will help enhance software development execution for Valven Atlas users. We are confident that Valven Atlas time in state report will take efficiency to the next level and our customers will get closer to elite team performance.
Improved User Management Capabilities
Valven Atlas offers insights into various stages and entities of the development cycle such as projects, teams, and repositories to differentiate the valuable data for each entity and gain further perspective. ​
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We know that each product or project managed by the organization can have different managers dealing with the process. Therefore, a mechanism to limit some users' access to only the related data will reduce the amount of the data the manager should scan and ensure that the manager is only focusing on the related part.
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While distributing access to different contacts in charge, top-layer management can follow through with all the projects and can have comprehensive reporting about every entity in the organization.
New Parameters Enhancing Insight Scope
The insights and guidance Valven Atlas provides are collected from various data sources and analyzed with an AI-powered engineering assistant by including a large set of parameters. Additionally, each organization carries various strategies and flows that should be covered to provide the best possible analysis.
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We are focusing on creating a flexible system to provide more value. This is why we constantly improve our parameter base to improve accuracy and offer valuable insights to improve engineering performance.
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With this release, we are now taking the developer experience in the company and the assigned project to understand the behavior better and associate the data with the work completed. This will enable us to provide better assumptions and accurate insights into the completed work.
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Additionally, new parameters are added to measure the code impact through a detailed review to provide more value with the behavioral analysis reports for projects and individuals.
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Additional Improvements
We are constantly working to improve the experience through UX/UI principles, performance enhancements, connected application flows, and more. ​
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In this release update, we have provided improvements to Valven Atlas users in the following areas:
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DORA Metrics - Target branch support
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Projects - Project delete option
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UX/UI - Search option for the filters
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Connected Apps - Alerting mechanisms for token expire cases
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Performance Updates
28 August, 2023
Sprint Overview for Enhanced Productivity
We're excited to introduce the latest enhancement to Valven Atlas - Sprint Overview! With the knowledge of Sprints playing a key role for teams adopting agile and scrum strategies, our mission is to empower the teams with the tools they need to succeed in every sprint. With Sprint Reports, you now have an even clearer view of your sprint progress, ensuring that you can meet your project milestones effectively.
What's Included in Sprint Reports?
Valven Atlas Sprint Overview offers some key reports to monitor the current status and projection for the sprint completion.
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An overview of current and previous sprints in terms of story points or included issues to demonstrate the progress.
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The insights section to provide points to be careful and suggestions to meet the Sprint requirements, highlighting bottlenecks and areas of improvement.
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Cumulative Flow Diagram to track the flow of work items throughout the sprints. It helps you quickly assess if your team's productivity is on track.
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Burndown Chart to compare the planned sprint timeline with the actual progress made in terms of issues or story points. A valuable tool helps ensure that you stay on course to meet your sprint objectives.​
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Why Would Use Sprint Overview with Valven Atlas?
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With Sprint Overview, while Valven Atlas users are gaining a deeper understanding of the sprint's health and progress, previous sprints and daily breakdowns can be reviewed to investigate progress and identify any issues that may lead to any performance change.
By visualizing the work items and timelines, team leads can make data-driven decisions to keep the sprints on target. Additionally, Valven Atlas's intuitive interface ensures that you can effortlessly create and share these reports with the team, fostering collaboration and transparency.
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It is important to not take any risk when it comes to sprint success and resource allocation. Elevate your productivity and project management with Sprint Overview in Valven Atlas. Try it today and experience the difference in your sprint planning and execution.
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We're committed to continuous improvement and helping you achieve your development goals, one sprint at a time. As always, more updates and features will be designed to streamline your software development process and improve efficiency!
15 July, 2023
Linear Issue Tracking Is Supported Now
Issue management details support development metrics and measure a team’s efficiency regarding the stages of the development cycle.
The value of Valven Atlas with the integration to issue management systems leading the Faraday Product Team to extend the existing Jira integration with more issue management platforms.
We now support Linear -another proven solution in the issue management market- to offer our value to software development teams empowering their process with Linear.
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You can integrate your Linear account to increase visibility on your teams' development behaviors.
Extending Issue Management Platforms with YouTrack
Valven Atlas can now generate analysis on development cycle details of teams utilizing YouTrack -another widely used issue management tool- and empowering their cycles to improve company performance.
Through the integration, we aim to target the teams using YouTrack and help them to have a better understanding of their issue-related cycles and the coordination between development behaviors and their impact on the deployment cycle.
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You can integrate your YouTrack account with a couple of simplified steps and start exploring the value Valven Atlas provides.
New Automation Rule For Better Process Tracking
Valven Atlas automation feature enables our customers to create a set of conditions to emphasize established development behaviors among the teams.
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There are cases of pushing an additional commit after the pull request is approved but not merged. These cases may result in pushing code chunks without any review leading to problematic releases.
Valve Atlas users now can create an automation flow to be notified when any commit is made after the pull request approval so that the notification can turn into action and the team can make sure that all additions will go through a health review cycle.