Analytic lenses: essential views for your Value Stream Management (VSM) organization

Digital.ai’s Value Stream Management platform is built from three main layers:

• Orchestration
• Intelligence
• Shared Services

Spanning all three VSM platform layers are analytic lenses — powerful AI/ML-driven tools capable of giving your organization the optimal view for all key areas, end-to-end across the value stream and the release lifecycle. Live metric monitoring provides insights at a glance as well as a single source of truth to align teams. The analytic lenses also leverage historic data to offer predictive and prescriptive capabilities.

All lenses are fueled by data generated within the organization’s own DevOps and enterprise app environments. By using their own key systems of record as data sources, organizations not only receive data feedback in near-real-time, but they also obtain insights unique to their own value streams and DevOps environments.
These capabilities empower organizations to make data-driven decisions and hasten time to value. By obtaining the right information at the right time, business leaders can align teams and ensure trajectory along with the intended outcome.

Currently, there are 4 main analytic lenses available:

• Plan & Create Lens
• Release & Deploy Lens
• Integrate & Test Lens
• Operate & Monitor Lens

Plan & Create Lens

The Plan & Create Lens provides agile teams with data-driven insights for the purposes of improving development efficiency while managing feature portfolios with key outcomes in mind, pushing for an overall goal of delivering better products faster.

The lens is fueled by planning and development process data generated within Agile planning tools like Digital.ai Agility and Atlassian Jira. Metrics like work item status, cycle times, team velocity, and historic sprint progress data can be analyzed, providing a unified view of internal performance while generating key insights. Analytics capabilities available out-of-the-box, integrating with nearly all best-of-breed solutions for product portfolio management (PPM), agile planning, and team management. 
Sample analyses that can be performed with this  lens include:

• Sprint analysis — Monitor key performance factors like team workload balance, time to resolve known issues, and overall efficiency trends.
• Project backlog — Make managing backlog items easier by indicating status, age, and current team progress.
• Program increment — Set performance goals and seek faster velocity while observing progress across different feature teams, all while highlighting opportunities to improve.

Release & Deploy Lens

The Release & Deploy Lens uncovers sources of release delays, defects, and inefficiencies. Its goal is to enable teams to find repeatable, predictable success, release after release. At the same time, it surfaces factors that can lead to risks like change failures, security vulnerabilities, or compliance violations. Bottlenecks are a major target revealed through historical analysis of the factors that tend to affect cycle time and overall release quality. 

To generate these insights, the lens can gather data from across the organization’s Release Orchestration tools (like Digital.ai Release) and the end-to-end DevOps toolchain. It provides visibility into release pipelines and all integrated tools to deliver insights as well as customizable visualizations.

Sample analyses that can be performed with this tics lens include:

• Release phase analysis — Track historical data on each phase of the release process to locate the steps that tend to have the highest variability for time spent or results produced, revealing the organization’s most impactful bottlenecks
• Task execution review — Create a burndown chart of each task in the release process, revealing the biggest contributors to lengthy lead times. This information can be used to push for greater automation, and it can also be used to model performance in successful value streams and duplicate it across the organization.
• Release overview — Visualize key performance stats from all recent releases within a single view. Leverage this data to highlight “risky” tasks that lead to unpredictability, allowing for process improvements to smooth out pipeline performance and decrease the percentage of release failures.

Integrate & Test Lens

The Integrate & Test Lens is focused on providing development, testing, and QA teams with the data-driven insights they need. Insights generated from the lens can be used to improve testing coverage, reduce escaped defects, and inspire more robust coding practices overall.

Using the lens allows IT leaders to visualize code coverage as well as performance for build & test automation. They can use this information alongside data on test execution results and historical defects to dive deep into their sources of systemic issues and overall quality trends. This solution integrates with some of the industry’s most common CI, testing, and quality assurance tools, right out of the box.

Sample analyses that can be performed with this lens include:

• Build success — Use historic data on successful builds as well as build failures and aborted builds to model success factors and raise the quality and reliability of builds overall.
• Test automation — Visualize test coverage, performance, and automation to uncover opportunities to improve while raising QA efficiency and effectiveness.
• Release quality — Maintain a high-level view of priority release quality metrics to monitor testing results, escaped defects, and other factors stemming from the  build quality.

Operate & Monitor Lens

The Operate & Monitor Lens is focused on production environment performance through the perspective of the customer experience. Generated data informs operations and ITSM leaders, allowing them to implement continuous service improvements and reduce costs and mean time to resolve incidents, problems, changes, and requests.

The information generated by the Operate & Monitor lens allows IT operations leaders to move past simple process-based KPIs and truly assess the health of the production environment from the customer perspective. Powerful AI/ML algorithms leverage both structured and unstructured data to uncover key sources of problems and impacted value delivery to customers.

Unify service providers and vendors using a single source of truth and proactive suggestions for service improvement. Best of all, the lens contains out-of-the-box integrations for some of the world’s most popular ITSM, Change Management, CMDB, and APM systems.

Sample analyses that can be performed with this lens include:

• Application change impact
  • Model how changes could impact the production environment to quickly correlate them with performance degradations and probable root causes for incidents.
• Team & vendor performance
  • Maintain transparency and accountability among all ITSM teams with a single source of truth for KPI performance and progress towards business objectives.​
• Major incident hotspots
  • Reveal sources of change failures and production problems based on hotspots by location, application, configuration item or assignment group, allowing teams to take proactive action to prevent major incidents.

Panoramic View: DORA metrics

Digital.ai Analytics Lenses can be combined to provide organizational leaders with a single source of truth. This feature allows leaders to identify and address issues across the value stream, spanning development and operations. 

Visibility effectively eliminates the blind spots frequently created by siloed DevOps teams while tracking the effects of a given issue across all areas affected. For example, a source of service unavailability in production can be tracked to both current APM trends as well as historic data on engineering team activities for the current release. The ultimate goal is to monitor all four DORA metrics plus availability, enabling DevOps teams to track and increase the performance of their software release processes, get critical features to customers faster, and improve system reliability and availability.

The five DORA metrics include the following, with “availability” added:

• Deployment frequency
• Change lead times
• Mean time to restore service (MTTR)
• Change failure rates
• Product availability (uptime)

Teams can use analytics lenses to monitor industry-standard DORA metrics, plus availability, in order to track and increase the performance of their software release processes, get critical features to customers faster, and improve system reliability and availability.

Intelligent product monitoring and DevOps management to preserve integrity and value delivery

Digital.ai Analytics Lenses empower your organization with ready access to insights in order to make key decisions from a data-driven perspective. Eliminate siloing and fragmented views, contributing to collective alignment across departments and teams.

Remain in the know at all times and make sharing this knowledge with key stakeholders easier than ever with our comprehensive suite of powerful analytics lenses.