Analytics

Since Ellipsis is installed into your GitHub repository, it sees all the pull requests, commits, and other events. Ellipsis uses this data to track various engineering performance metrics to help teams understand productivity, quality, and collaboration patterns. You can inspect this data directly using the dashboard or ask questions using the Slackbot.

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Units of Work

We define a “unit of work” to be the amount of code the median software engineer wrote during 1 hour of work in the year 2020. This metric considers the logical complexity of the changes. We use this definition to normalize the amount of work done by different people and different time periods. You can see how many units of work your team completed in a given time period by looking at the “Units of Work” chart on the “Analytics” page.

How we define a unit of work is arbitrary; what’s important is how your team velocity changes compared over time. We’ve analyzed hundreds of thousands of pull requests to come up with a standard unit of “work”.

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Leaderboard

The leaderboard shows you the top contributors to your team based on the number of units of work they’ve completed.

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Size Distribution

You can track the size distribution of merged pull requests by looking at the “Size Distribution” chart on the “Analytics” page. Ideally, these are all x-small to medium sized PRs.

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Complexity Distribution

We also track the complexity distribution of merged pull requests. Ideally, these are all small and medium complexity PRs.

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Technology Usage

You can track the technology usage of your team by looking at the “Technology Usage” chart on the “Analytics” page.

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Timeline

You can use the timeline to drill down into specific pull requests. Click on a row to expand it and see more details, including a summary of the PR, the classification, and the number of units of work it contains.

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Querying Metrics with the Slackbot

You can easily access these metrics by asking questions directly to the Ellipsis Slackbot. Simply tag @ellipsis in a channel or send a direct message to get instant answers.

Example questions you can ask:

• “@Ellipsis what was our average PR review time last month?”
• “@Ellipsis which repositories had the most bug fixes this quarter?”
• “@Ellipsis how has our deployment frequency changed over the past 6 months?”
• “@Ellipsis who are our top contributors to the backend services?”
• “@Ellipsis generate a report of our engineering metrics for Q1”
• “@Ellipsis compare our code churn rate between Q1 and Q2”
• “@Ellipsis which PRs took longest to review in the last sprint?”
• “@Ellipsis what’s the trend in our documentation coverage?”
• “@Ellipsis who reviews the most PRs on our team?”
• “@Ellipsis which part of our codebase changes most frequently?”
• “@Ellipsis create a velocity report for the auth service team”
• “@Ellipsis what was our average time to fix critical bugs this year?”