Keeping track of a software development project often involves complex spreadsheets & hard to follow dedicated tools. If you’re a Project Manager or have some other non-techie business role, you’ll be hard pressed to understand what’s going on. This is where Waydev can be a great help. It grabs advanced metrics from source control & presents a distilled number that tells you, at a glance, whether your project is on track, or you if need to worry.
Communication, especially when it involves software engineers & business types, is not easy. Waydev “eliminates the tension & frustration generally associated with communicating across disciplines.”
Alex Circei, CEO of the California, USA-based Waydev says in a blog post that keeping development on track shouldn’t involve your delving deep into some charts & spreadsheets. His options as a non-techie business type were limited, so he decided to build a useful tool that anyone could understand.
Most of the time a micro-management approach is taken & you “look over the developer’s shoulder” every time there’s a delay or a problem. This consists in interrupting developers’ work by updating issue status, marking items on checklists, or changing post-its to different columns.
Alex Circei believes that this approach isn’t very good, in that it needs constant maintenance, it takes focus away from coding & puts it on management roles, measuring project success as a function of tasks completed. Project dashboards tend to squeeze a lot of useless detailed information onto the screen.
Waydev contextualizes the way you look at a project’s progress by looking at relative sizes of different projects & “looking at how much actual code is in the repository & how long it took to write it.” When there’s a dramatic change in the number of lines of code written, it’s a sign that there’s some kind of issue. Size & frequency of version updates & commits is also looked at.
The following summarizes how Waydev works:
- The non-technical manager creates an account & invites developers to join the projects
- The developer connects a Git account from Github, Gitlab or Bitbucket & selects relevant repositories
- After some code is committed, the manager will see a streamlined dashboard with the most important development metrics
You can get a free version of Waydev for 1 project & 2 contributor, with limited developer insights & email & chat support. For US $49/month you can subscribe to the “Standard” plan, which includes up to 5 projects & a team size of up to 5 contributors as well as phone support. The “Plus” plan goes up to 10 projects & contributors for US $99/month.
– This is a startup profile based on publicly available material & not a review –
Image Credit: Waydev
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