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Jellyfish watches for the sting of developer bottlenecks

Dashboard your DevOps data and see where your team has been slacking

Boston-based software biz Jellyfish believes it can help devs write better code by focusing on the adjacent processes to avoid software slowdowns.

The toolmaker on Tuesday announced Life Cycle Explorer, a utility for spotting software engineering bottlenecks during the software development lifecycle. It's part of Jellyfish's Engineering Management Platform and appears as a tab within its web application.

Creating software, the firm says, isn't just about typing lines of code. It also includes the planning period during which ideas are refined, code reviews for assessing how ideas were executed, and code deployment.

Tracking and graphing this process can provide some insight into what's working – and what isn't.

"Modern software development teams and their leaders have no easy way to visualize, break down, and understand their development life cycles," said Krishna Kannan, head of product at Jellyfish, in a statement.

"With Life Cycle Explorer, teams can identify and remediate bottlenecks, unlock process obstacles, and improve trends through the full life cycle of software development."

Life Cycle Explorer aims to give engineering managers a window into the software development life cycle (SDLC) – a matter of concern among various SDLC methodologies, including Agile, DevOps, and Waterfall, to name a few. The tool shows where development slowdowns have occurred by tracking issues visible in Jira workflows.

The software categorizes captured activity as refinement, work, review or deployment, calculating the amount of time an issue spends in each stage and representing the results graphically.

Screenshot of Jellyfish Engineering Management Platform

Screenshot of Jellyfish Engineering Management Platform – Click to enlarge

Aston Whiteling, product manager at Jellyfish, and Evan Klein, head of product, told The Register that the Jellyfish app gets data for its analytics via API from services like Jira and GitHub. Life Cycle Explorer can consume a mix of Jira and Git data, as well as the output of several DevOps tools.

"We pull all of our data from our customers' existing DevOps tools; Life Cycle Explorer works without any change to those workflows, integrating automatically into their production pipelines," explained the Jellyfolk. "The tool provides real-time analytics for delivery bottleneck recognition in process workflows, but it can also be used to assess projects with a view to longer term strategy and decision making."

Life Cycle Explorer has just launched, so there is no data yet on how the software has improved real project outcomes. According to Whiteling and Klein, about 50 customers are already using the feature among a set of about 300 clients representing more than 35,000 software engineers.

Jellyfish does not publish its prices – we're told annual licensing is calculated on a per-engineer basis. ®

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