Learn more about Jira Align alternatives below. Software development has come a long way from the Waterfall model of the ’90s to the Agile Data-Driven of today. Data-driven engineering management has become some sort of buzzword that many organizations throw around, but very few achieve it. Engineering Managers can’t draw any conclusions concerning their project or implement measures to improve performance without consulting the data from their Git repositories and project management tools.
Development analytics tools have emerged from the need to obtain information regarding developers’ output without spending hours diving into Git repositories.
In this article, we will talk about a notable tool that provides software development analytics for data-driven organizations – Jira Align (formerly known as AgileCraft) and what are the best alternatives for it.
These are the top 3 alternatives to Jira Align (ex AgileCraft) that we will explore further below:
Waydev is a data-driven solution that helps engineering managers increase visibility into their teams’ activity, improve velocity and productivity.
Waydev does this by aggregating data from Git repos and project management tools into real-time reports and insights into the software development process.
Activity – The Activity report helps users ensure a continuous delivery workflow by identifying how involved the engineers are in the development process. Users can spot outliers by monitoring this report, such as overcapacity engineers or engineers who may be blocked. This information can be used to drive a conversation around the capabilities and workload of the developers.
Review Workflow – With this report’s help, users can dive deeper into the Pull Request activity. This is a great place to start for gaining a high-level perspective on the activities. The Review Workflow report allows users to pinpoint long-running pull requests and address the issues that stop them from being merged, be it a late review or unclear requirements.
Activity Heatmap – The Activity Heatmap report helps engineering managers visualize the most productive hours for their developers and schedule meetings accordingly to keep the workflow disruptions at a minimum. In the context of remote work, it’s also useful for identifying the engineers that are more productive at night or in the early morning. Another use case occurs when managing engineering teams distributed across the globe.
Developer Performance – The Developer Performance report is a great way for engineering managers to visualize the whole team’s performance. The Developer Performance gathers code-level and pull request metrics in a customizable report that users can investigate and get an understanding of how individual contributors work.
Targets – Visualizing and keeping track of engineering KPIs is made easier with the Targets feature. Engineering managers and executives can set custom targets for developers, teams, and organizations and then get notified when there’s progress. There will be no more uncovered opportunities as long as managers and executives can transform them into measurable, actionable targets.
PR Resolution – The PR Resolution report is designed to help engineering managers identify the outliers in their code review process, observe team dynamics and the factors contributing to them. This report enables users to find the bottlenecks in the PR cycle over the course of a sprint, by concentrating on six PR cycle metrics: Time to Resolve, Time to First Comment, Number of Follow-on Commits, Number of reviewers on a PR, Number of reviewer comments on a PR, and the Average number of comments per reviewer. We recommend bringing this report to retrospectives and discuss what changes you can make in the next sprints.
Waydev provides three pricing plans:
Jira Align (ex Agile Craft) defines their product as a software lifecycle management solution meant to scale the enterprise’s Agile method. They address organizations who are trying to change and implement Agile into their work methods.
Project Financial Management – Users are able to track, manage, and report on the budget and actual costs of the project. This feature also provides time-tracking data and uses it to calculate labor cost allocations.
Advanced Time-Tracking – This report captures individual time spent on specific assigned tasks and then allocates labor costs to the related project.
Risk/ Issue Management – Jira Align enables users to define and manage project risk and issue status and then track and resolve the potential risks and ongoing issues.
Work Management – Users can define, schedule, and assign tasks to team members. Specific features that go into much more detail are Task Assignment, scheduling, and Task Relationship.
Jira Align offers two pricing plans:
AllStacks is a predictive forecasting and risk management solution for engineering activity. They use machine learning and AI models across the whole development pipeline in order to identify high-risk initiatives and provide actionable advice. Similar to other software development analytics tools, it collects historical data and behaviors from the apps your team is using (GitHub, BitBucket, Jira, etc.).
Portfolio Report – This report showcases trends, what’s on track, and forecasts risks that should be addressed in order for the team to deliver on time;
Milestone Report – The Milestone Report identifies changes in scope creep, unaddressed process issues, and changes in the forecasted delivery date;
Pull Request Cycle Time – A metric dedicated to engineering managers. This metric records process changes and measures the alignment with the objectives while also looking for emerging issues;
WIP Report – This report looks into tasks that regressed to previous stages, required large amounts of code churn, or show more comments than usual, signaling that the requirements are unclear.
Users need to contact AllStacks to obtain information about the pricing options.
Jellyfish is an engineering management solution aiming to help engineering managers align developers’ performance with strategic business objectives. They provide visibility into software development output by gathering and analyzing engineering signals and contextual business data. This product is suited for data-driven software engineering leaders in charge of teams larger than 50 developers.
Alignment – Helps engineering leaders align their decisions with the software development activity and showcases how management decisions influence resource allocation and net gain;
Investment distribution – This report presents a detailed list of time spent on every work category ( Roadmap, Unplanned, Infrastructure, Support, and Other);
Product Pillars – Users can use this feature to find where the issues are located and correct any misalignments between their goals and their output.
Users need to contact Jellyfish to obtain information about the pricing options.
An honorary mention is cPrime, a global consulting company that provides solutions to help companies deploy Agile at scale. They are affiliated with AWS Advanced, SAFe Gold SPCT, GitLab, Atlassian, and many others.
cPrime seeks to improve the software product development process with solutions meant to ease adopting and scaling Agile methodologies and software. They offer solutions for Hardware, DevOps, and Jira. In order to achieve its goal – to help organizations become Agile – cPrime has partnered with renowned organizations and provides training, consulting, and team augmentations.
Their solutions sets cover the software development pipeline in order to achieve effective product delivery.
If you want to find out more about how Waydev can help you, schedule a demo.
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