We’ve redesigned our Slack app from the ground up to elevate your team’s collaboration and productivity. With new features — like reminders for blocked pull requests and previews of upcoming deployments — you can keep your team on track and stay on top of work that’s in-flight.

It’s also now easier than ever to try out our Slack integration. Starting today, you can find our app in the official Slack marketplace.

✨ What’s new

• Deployment previews: When you’re ready to ship, send a preview of your upcoming deployments to team members in Slack.
• Digests: Share updates with your team and see how your team is tracking against your working agreements.
• Reminders: Get automated reminders when pull requests waiting on review, approval, merge, and deployment do not meet your working agreements.
• Async reviews: Start group code reviews and create new Slack channels for your pull requests to collect and share feedback during the code review process.
• Standup bot: Automate daily standup by generating a message that recaps your recently closed and currently open pull requests.

⚡ Get started with Slack

You can learn more about our app for Slack in the marketplace.

We’re starting off the year with new insights into lead time to help you understand how long it takes you to make product changes. With the lead time dashboard, you can answer questions like:

• How are we performing relative to before?
• Where are there bottlenecks in our development process?
• Which changes took us the longest to make?
• Is this increase in our lead time caused by longer review and deploy times or an increase in our work load?

✨  What’s new?

• Breakdowns of lead time by stage, team, repository, and label to help you identify bottlenecks.
• Comparisons to previous period to see how your team is trending.
• Related metrics, such as review turnaround time and time to deploy, to see what’s impacting lead time.
• Insight into which changes took the longest to make, organized by pull request.

👋  Get in touch

We’d love to hear your feedback on our new lead time insights. Otherwise, stay tuned — we have some exciting updates in the weeks ahead.

Our latest update helps you stay on top of work that’s ready to be deployed and prevent large backlogs of changes. With new deployment metrics and more powerful Slack notifications, you can make your team’s deployments faster, easier, and more frequent.

✨  What’s new?

• Keep a pulse on the overall health of your deployment process with new summary metrics. Get insight into how long it takes to deploy changes, the number of recent deployments, and the success rate of those deployments.
• Track upcoming deployments with a summary of pull requests ready to ship, organized by repository and sorted by the maximum age of changes waiting to be deployed.
• Notify your team team of changes that need to be deployed with deployment previews in Slack.
• Prevent changes from becoming stale by setting up notifications when changes are not deployed within some number of days of being merged.
• View recent deployments to keep track of previously released changes.

🔷  Get started with previews in Slack

When you send a preview of a deployment to Slack, we’ll share a summary of the pull requests ready to ship and their authors. Head over to your Upcoming Deployments and select View to open an information panel, where you can then select the channel you want to notify.

👋  Get in touch

Need help connecting Slack or configuring deployments? You can find some time to chat with us and we’ll walk you through how you can use the Ready to Deploy feature to improve your team’s velocity.

We’ve listened to your feedback over the last several months. We’re updating our pricing to be simpler and more flexible. Our Pro plan now starts at $99/mo for organizations of up to 20 developers.

When you upgrade, you'll unlock instant access to your team's lead time trend over the last three months. We've also added features to supercharge your team, like a Slack weekly digest and notifications to remind you about slipping work. 

Additional integrations, such as CI/CD tools, start at $33/mo and can be added to your plan for more advanced insights into your deployments. You can learn more about our updated plans on our website.

✨  Why the change?

• It’s simpler. Instead of charging per developer, we charge a base platform fee based on the size of your engineering organization.
• It’s predictable. With a flat monthly platform fee, you have room to grow your team without worrying about any surprise bills from us.
• Pay only for what you need. Optional add-ons, like Deployment Insights, help you get more out of our platform when you connect more integrations.

You can also schedule time with us if you’d like to learn more about how Software can help your team with faster code reviews and more frequent deployments.

Chances are you've felt pain around deploying changes to production. Deployments cause stress and anxiety for everyone involved, especially when they happen infrequently. 

Today, we’re releasing Ready to Deploy — a feature that provides visibility into apps with a backlog of changes waiting to be deployed. We built this feature to help ease deployment pain for engineering teams. You can see all of your team’s merged pull requests, organized by repository and sorted by how long they’ve been awaiting deployment.

✨  What’s new?

• Undeployed PRs: see the number of pull requests ready to deploy for your team.
• Merge to deploy: see which repositories have the longest average time between merging and deploying pull requests.
• Time to deploy goal: set a goal for time to deploy to prevent changes from piling up right before pushing to production.
• Visibility from open to deploy: track work in progress all the way from code review (using the Open Pull Requests view) to deployment (using the Ready to Deploy view).
• Advanced filters: filters allow you to change the data range and choose whether to include or exclude pull requests created by bots (e.g. Dependabot).

💭 How does it work?

1. Go to our Ready to Deploy feature to see your data. It works out-of-the-box with our existing GitHub integration if you’re using GitHub Actions, deployments, or releases.
2. We automatically detect how you deploy each repository, but you can also manually assign specific workflow runs, check runs, deployments, and releases as production deployments for each repository.

👋   Latest from the community

• Omar Bahareth, CTO at Ejaro, wrote Engineering Management: An Overview, a deep dive into the most important responsibilities of engineering managers.

Our team aims to make deployments fast and frequent, minimizing the risk of bugs each time we push new changes live. We built the Deploy feature to help teams measure performance and improve stability of their mainline systems. In addition to key metrics like deployment frequency, you can also see which repositories take the longest to deploy or fail to deploy most often.

✨  What’s new?

• Time from open to deploy: average time from opening to deploying a pull request
• Deployment frequency: count of production deployments per developer per day
• Time between deployments: average time between successful deployments
• Deployment run time: average time elapsed per deployment
• Slowest deployments: repositories that take the longest to deploy
• Deployment success rate: count of successful production deployments vs. the total over time
• Least successful deployments: repositories that fail to deploy most frequently
• Deployment batch size: average number of code changes per deployment

💭   How does it work?

1. Go to our Deploys feature to see your data. It works out-of-the-box with our existing GitHub integration if you’re using GitHub Actions, deployments, or releases.
2. We automatically detect how you deploy each repository, but you can also manually assign specific workflow runs, check runs, deployments, and releases as production deployments for each repository.

👋   Latest from our team

• Brett wrote a guest post for InsideBigData: Why You Should Add DevOps Metrics to Your Data Fabric.

Sometimes work slips through the cracks. That’s why we built Goals — to help you stay on top of work and get notified when you don’t. Connect Slack to keep your team in the loop, with our new daily digest for in-flight work.

✨  New

• Goals: We automatically suggest goals for your team, but you can customize each goal to fit your needs. A few ideas to get you started:
  • Review pull requests in less than a day
  • Every contributor participates in a code review each week
  • Deploy pull requests within two days of being merged
• Slack Digests: Daily digests make it easy to share updates with your team about work that’s in progress and see how your team is tracking against your goals.

💡   Getting started with Slack digests (3 mins)

1. Go to our Goals feature.
2. Connect a Slack workspace.
3. You will also be prompted to set a default Slack channel for each GitHub team.
4. We’ll summarize your progress toward your goals in your team's daily digest.

👋   Latest from our team

• Mason, our CTO, was featured on DevOps Paradox, where he talked about protecting code time, finding time to focus, and creating a productive work environment.

The new Open Pull Requests view makes it easier to stay on top of work that’s in-flight. You can quickly see which pull requests are waiting for reviews or approvals, and which are ready to deploy. You can also set goals for your code reviews, so things don’t slip over time.

We’re making this feature available to everyone while in Beta.

✨  New

• Pull Requests: All your team’s open pull requests broken down by stage (awaiting review, awaiting merge, and ready to deploy). From here you can quickly find and open in GitHub any pull requests that might be stuck.
• Summary Metrics: Quick metrics on your team’s work in progress, such as the number of open pull requests and how long they’ve been waiting on review or approvals. These reflect your currently open pull requests to give you a real-time view of code reviews:
  • Pull requests in progress: Count of open PRs
  • Ready to merge: Average time since approval
  • Awaiting approval: Average time since review
  • Awaiting review: Average time since open
• Team Goals: Set team goals for code reviews (e.g. approve pull requests within a day), so you can stay on track.

👋   Latest from our team

• Geoff wrote about how teams can make deploys faster and safer in Frequent, less painful deployments.

The new Slack integration helps you collaborate on pull requests and automate your daily workflows. You can quickly see your team’s open pull requests and their current status directly in Slack, where you can then either start a group review or view them on GitHub.

✨  New

• Pull Requests: The /pull_requests Slack command shows a list of your team’s open pull requests, including their title, author, repository, and review status (e.g. needs review, commented, or approved).
• Group Reviews: You can start a group review for your pull requests in an ephemeral Slack channel. When you hover over a pull request in the web app, you can now either View on GitHub or Start a Group Review, which creates a new Slack channel with the name of the pull request.
• Daily Standups: The /daily_standup Slack command provides a quick way to share updates with your team without needing to find, copy, and paste the names and links for all your open pull requests.

👋   Latest from our team

• Brett shares a few ways teams can experiment with code reviews in An efficient code review process has fast feedback loops. 

You can now get deeper insights into the health of your code review process. The Review section shows you how long it takes to review, approve, and merge pull requests. You can also view the average pull request size (to prevent large pull requests from blocking reviews) and code review participation (to ensure the review workload is shared across team members).

We’re making this feature available to everyone while in Beta.

✨  New

• Time to Review, Approve, Merge: Get a breakdown of your code review process by stage to see where you can experiment and improve.
• Pull Request Size: See the average number of lines of code changed per pull request.
• Code Review Participation: See the percent of contributors on your team participating in code reviews.

💎  Improvements

• Filter by team: Team filters help you quickly drill down into the most important data for you and your team by allowing you to filter metrics by team. Teams are automatically synced from GitHub.
• Settings: Organization settings now include a new GitHub tab, where you can add or remove team members from your billing plan

🐞  Fixes

• Fixed an issue where users were not receiving their weekly DevOps metrics email report.
• Fixed a few small issues with graph labels and subtitles to make them clearer.

👋   Latest from our team

• Brett, co-founder here at Software, wrote an article in Fast Company: Leaders: You’re sitting on a goldmine that will help you create better flexible-work policies.