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Engineering Performance Metrics

Ellipsis tracks various engineering performance metrics to help teams understand productivity, quality, and collaboration patterns. These metrics provide insights into your development process and help identify areas for improvement.

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Key Metrics Tracked

  • Pull Request Volume: Number of PRs opened, reviewed, and merged over time
  • Code Review Cycle Time: Time from PR creation to merge
  • Review Engagement: Average comments, approvals, and requested changes per PR
  • Bug Fix Rate: Percentage of commits that fix bugs vs. adding features
  • Code Churn: Frequency of changes to recently modified code
  • Deployment Frequency: How often code is deployed to production
  • Team Collaboration: Cross-repository contributions and knowledge sharing
  • Documentation Coverage: Changes to documentation relative to code changes

Ellipsis doesn’t just track metrics—it analyzes trends over time to help you understand:

  • How your team’s velocity changes during project phases
  • Which repositories require the most maintenance
  • Where technical debt might be accumulating
  • How review practices impact code quality
  • Which team members contribute to different areas of the codebase

These insights help engineering leaders make data-driven decisions about process improvements, resource allocation, and technical strategy.

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Exploring the Timeline

Ellipsis provides an interactive timeline view that visualizes your engineering activity over time. This timeline aggregates all of your tracked metrics into an easy-to-navigate interface where you can:

  • Drill down into specific time periods
  • Filter by repository, team member, or metric type
  • Identify patterns and anomalies in your development process
  • Discover correlations between different metrics

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Searching the Timeline

The timeline interface includes powerful search capabilities that let you filter and explore your metrics:

  1. Date Range Selection: Narrow down to specific timeframes (last week, month, quarter, custom range)
  2. Repository Filters: Focus on specific projects or codebases
  3. Contributor Filters: Analyze individual or team performance
  4. Metric Type Filters: Concentrate on specific aspects like review times or bug rates
  5. Event Type Filters: Filter by pull requests, commits, deployments, etc.

This search functionality helps you quickly find the data you need to understand your engineering performance and make informed decisions.

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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?”

The Slackbot can quickly answer specific questions about ongoing work. For example, you can ask about the status of a migration effort, and Ellipsis will reference the latest relevant PR that completes the work.

You can also ask about team members’ contributions. Simply ask what a teammate merged in the past week, and Ellipsis will provide a concise summary of their most important PRs and their impacts.

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Timeline View

The timeline interface provides a comprehensive view of your engineering activities with powerful filtering capabilities. You can filter by repository, user, and time period to see detailed summaries of each pull request.

Each summary includes valuable information about the pull request:

  • Complexity and size assessment
  • Scope of changes
  • Key modifications
  • Conventional commit titles
  • Technologies used

The Slackbot can also generate custom reports that combine multiple metrics, providing comprehensive views of your engineering performance over time. These reports can be shared with team members or stakeholders to demonstrate progress and identify areas for improvement.