Tata Health Case Study

The engineering leaders at Tata Health were looking for tools that would give them visibility into the issues that developers were facing when the pandemic started and all work moved remotely. The change to remote work meant that the daily face-to-face meetings with the team kind of vanished, all the standups being turned into Zoom calls.

The challenge was to spot the people who were struggling with getting help when they were stuck. This further increased the need for a software development analytics tool. But soon enough they came across Waydev.

Tata Health uses the Work Log report to get a comprehensive view of the teams’ activity. By zooming in into the commit and pull request activity, they eliminated guesswork and gained real insights into the work of their teams.

The need for manual input coming from individual engineers was eliminated by Waydev’s automated reports and allowed software developers to focus on delivering quality code.

Eliminating self-reporting from the equation led to identifying the engineers who experienced recurring issues that they didn’t bring up in team meetings, and helping them accordingly. This work pattern is frequent among software engineers, when working on a challenging task, they might not notice that days have passed churning, without a solution in sight.

Waydev’s Agile Data-Driven method of tracking engineers’ output is meant to give software engineering managers granular visibility and objective data that can optimize the decision-making process.

Waydev has impacted the way Tata Health communicates with their teams. Before Waydev, the conversation revolved around how many tickets were reported as resolved and analyzing the burndown charts to understand sprint progress. Now, they look into the Daily Update feature to find out where all the focus is being projected and measure the evolution of sprint velocity for each sprint.

“The features that we have planned? Are they having issues? Are they getting stuck? Those are the things that we were able to understand better with Waydev. The conversation changed from ‘Are you done? Are you not done?’ to ‘Okay, can we look at what’s happened? “

After starting to use Waydev, they obtained a deeper understanding of who was working on certain repositories and what kind of code was written. Being able to gauge the volume of code being written was one thing, but a very useful perspective was gained when they started to see the contribution of each team member and the area they were working on.

If the usual question was “Are you done or not?”, now they are more interested if their engineers have any issues or got stuck so they can work together towards improving their performance. Using Waydev shifted the focus from only getting the feature done to looking into the roadblocks and difficulties that the software engineers are facing.

Tata Health uses the Work Log report to understand how their teams work and identify struggling engineers who might be in need of support or coaching. This feature has proven to be great for understanding work patterns across teams and improving the effectiveness of standups.

The PR resolution feature helped in this sense, they started to find the bottlenecks in engineers’ PR cycles over the course of a sprint.

Tata Health acknowledged other development analytics tools, so normally they looked into a few others before choosing to work with Waydev. After running a few trials with other tools, Waydev proved to be the fastest one to pull data and generate reports for various timelines.

The speed of support was another crucial factor. For all the questions they asked they got almost instantaneous answers. In the end, Tata Health concluded that when time is of importance, getting all your questions answered in a matter of minutes really makes a difference.

Another advantage that Tata Health highlighted was the simplicity of the onboarding process. Tata Health only had to sign-in into their code hosting platform, authorize access, choose the repositories they wanted to analyze, and then simply load the project.