Waydev — Git analytics (2018) version 1.0

Waydev is designed to help non-technical founders understand and manage the work of your developers. You can access the detailed reports on your tablet or smartphone and at a glance you can see how much progress is being made and where the major roadblocks remain. Because it is designed for non-technical founders (like myself), you can still keep your project on track, even if you don’t know the details behind each specific line of code.

👋 Hey everyone! First of all, thanks @writerpollock for hunting Waydev! We're psyched to be here. I built my first online business back in 2007, and since then, I've created and launched tens of products. I've worked with developers all my entrepreneurial life, but all that time, I was frustrated not knowing why we were missing deadlines, why we were stuck, or why we were slacking off. 😞 I know that if you know a little bit about code, you can study the code, but if not, you are asking questions and following your intuition, and in most cases, you are dead wrong—you don't know anything 😣 Without real data, you can't take any decision. Fortunately, because most of the developers' works are in GIT, we've found the solution to tracking their activity. We've built Waydev, a tool with which you can track real data from your developers, without their input with the mission to help the community of non-technical entrepreneurs worldwide 🙌 Waydev brings everything you need to track your development team 📈 ✅An easy-to-understand overview of your developers’ work ✅A single metric to follow, week after week ✅Comprehensive deep analytics for each developer We’re integrated with Github and Bitbucket, and will integrate with Gitlab, Slack & Google Apps in the upcoming month. I’m hoping to get your feedback, questions, and ideas here 🙏🏼 PS: ❤️ We have a great deal for Product Hunt, too: Apply the code PRODUCTHUNT at checkout to save 50% OFF.

Congrats for the launch @alex_circei and @buzea_valentin! I saw the Slack and Google Suites logos on your homepage, how are you integrated with them?

I've been using this since the early days, I can say it's a very well crafted product. Since I'm a dev, I tracked my own progress over months and the algorithm seems to be on point. I will def continue to use when my team grows!

It's really a pain to track development efficiency sometimes so I see a lot of potential in this product. Great work!

I agree with what folks like Peter and James are saying. Lines of code and commit count are not accurate ways to measure "impact." Usually a high frequency of commits is an indication of poor code quality -- developers are introducing new changes to fix errors introduced by previous ones. Instead, you should expect a steady cadence of incremental changes, where proper time and thought is put into each. Test coverage is another important metric, which is not covered here. Further, most product-development organizations celebrate when developers remove lines of code. We, for example, have a bot that adds a "hand clapping" emoji to a commit when the developer has removed code. In short, a high commit volume and more lines of code are often anathema to what good software development is.

Overall I recommend this for non-devs. It's a nice UI/UX wrapper on top of github. It has a very smooth onboarding experience and was easy to link up to Github. But... it's probably best used as a place to start discussions with developers rather than evidence of progress or absence. I was hoping to use this as a way to visualize my own development velocity but ran into a few gaps: - Can't track different branches other than master - I find the impact score a bit misleading since it's tied closely to # of commits. - Some of my commits are fairly massive updates while others are trivial. This means that it is still similar to rating the quality of a book by the number of pages - which is useful in some very basic scenarios but quickly degrades. Cheers!

I love that it's so easy to use for non-technical founders, especially that more and more marketers are going into the space of technical products and it gives them more flexibility and opportunities to learn.

Pros:

It's really simple to use

Cons:

None so far

This can easily be manipulated, and provides a false sense of insight into development work.

I hate to review a new startup this way. I just think that measuring these metrics is an ineffective strategy that discourages good behaviour.

Pros:

none

Cons:

Relatively meaningless metrics

I'm usually not one to go for negative reviews, but:

What is the "Impact" metric?

The metric you need to watch, week-by-week. At Waydev, we developed the "Impact" metric to analyze performance data. Impact takes the following into consideration: (1) The highest chunk of activity you did in the past, (2) The average activity of a developer based on our research and (3) The behavior of your activity in the last weeks.

"Activity" is not the same thing as impact. Teaching 'non-technical founders' that those two things are even remotely related sounds like a great way to undermine your team's actual impact. You don't want devs to blindly ram out and submit code. You want them to come up with smart, scaleable and effective ways to tackle issues and resolve challenges.

Pros:

I'm sure they mean well

Cons:

The core 'impact' metric doesn't signify actual impact and 'trains' non-devs on the wrong KPI's

In the entrepreneurial age, devs are the lifeblood of all projects.

Problem is that non-technical founders or managers have little to no control over them.

Having met 10s of founders with failed projects due to complicated circumstances with their outsourced dev teams, this simple tool gives an overview of their work so you can basically sleep better at night and focus on growing the business.

Pros:

For a non-tech manager, it gives an overview of your development teams' work

Cons:

Might be seen as micro-management by devs

I've been using Waydev for a while now and I love it! It's easier when you have an overview on your team's activity

Pros:

easy to use, clear metrics

Cons:

still looking for them

Hey guys, looks interesting. Let me ask a simple question to understand it a bit better - what exactly is the impact score and how is it calculated?

"Helping non-technical founders understand what's going on with their technical team" is a fantastic objective and well worth the effort - and this is why you're getting consistently positive early feedback from prospective non-technical founder customers. Unfortunately, counting SLOC and/or commits, *no matter how sophisticated your algorithm,* is a fundamentally flawed means of assessing either "what's going on" with a technical team or "how well are they doing," and this is why you're receiving consistently critical feedback from senior technical folks. The big problem you have is that your non-technical customers will eventually encounter the bad outcomes driven by a "how much stuff did I do" measurement approach, and when they do, they will be really angry with you because you will have effectively been lying to them for an extended period of time. *Non-technical founders: please don't ever measure software teams on how much stuff they did. It will make you very, very unhappy in the end.* Digging deeper, this is not a matter of "well what if we analyze the data better?" The problem is that the only real way to measure the impact of a technical team is in their ability to deliver value - and value is not encoded anywhere within any software repo, whether CVS, SVN, git, MTFS, BitBucket, or any other repo management tool. Period. If you want to measure value, you have no choice but to measure against requirements or user stories in some way.

It's super important to find ways for non-technical founders to connect with and manage engineers. This isn't one of them. Tracking an engineer by lines of code is like tracking a marketing person by the number of words on the home page. You don't want the most words, you want the most concise way to tell your story.

And number of git commits is not much better as it's super easy to game by just committing more often. Plus, if you want to get a high level sense of this, just look at the list of commits in GitHub.

Sorry - don't like to be negative about a startup or new product as I know the blood sweat and tears that go into making it, but this makes the world a worse place - sorry :(

Pros:

None

Cons:

It's a really bad idea :(

Be careful what you measure, you might improve.

You want to focus on the outcome, and not the output.

Pros:

None

Cons:

Not a good way to measure engineering effectiveness

If someone can explain to me how the sidebar in this page:

https://app.waydev.co/demo

And the comparison (when clicking on a user there) of how many commits A dev had on Friday two weeks ago compared to this Friday is in any way going to help a non-tech person I would be very grateful.

I'd also like to know how someone who doesn't know jack about development will be able to make sense iof John Dev A making 10 times less commits and writing 10 times less lines of code this week compared to last week.

There will be nothing worse for a non-tech manager to ask a question like "I noticed you're velocity/whatever-fancy-term-i'm-gonna-pick-as-a-non-tech-manager is down by a lot this week, care to explain why?".

Personally, if a potential client would say that it is using a tool like this, I would decline the project.

Pros:

Unclear

Cons:

This will literary destroy tech teams, frustrate devs and non-tech managers alike

This tool is a throwback to the 80's and 90's. Measuring lines of code and commits does not work. It usually leads to bloated code . Usually in the 90's it meant that instead of writing some neat quick routine, you would cut and paste some crap that you found that did the same thing, but had 3x the lines of code. So you looked better. As a developer I would write extra long code (usually slower and less effective) to get my code lines up. As far as commits, my best developer commits a couple of times a week as he wants to noodle on it and make it better. depending on your coding culture this could stifle good code writing. Frequent commits is a way of getting code out quickly, not necessarily getting good code out. Think of the paper at school where it had to be 10 pages. You wrote a great 8 page paper that hit the mark. You would then fill in crap to make it the 10 pages. Same here. Horrible metrics for measuring developers. IMHO

If you don't trust your technical team to execute the product vision and present you ongoing results, it's not time for a new tool, it's time for a new technical team.

Pros:

Unclear

Cons:

Utilizes specious metrics for "Impact"

Can't use superficial metrics like that. Means nothing. Needs to measure actual value created, e.g. by impact on the users, or feedback from customer interviews etc

Pros:

Seems like a good idea to non-tech founders

Cons:

Actually tells them nothing about progress made