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AntStack is one of the leading full-stack serverless consulting companies aiming at disrupting the cloud computing space by providing holistic solutions to get you up and running with serverless. We specialize in providing services like application development, application modernization, UI engineering, and data engineering & modernization that empower businesses to achieve unmatched efficiency, and cost-effectiveness. Our team of experienced experts brings a wealth of knowledge to the table, ensuring that every client’s unique needs are met with tailored serverless solutions.
Hi, welcome to yet another episode of TV. I'm Preeti. I'm a project manager at Anstack.
Vishwas:Hey, I'm Vishwas. I work as a Principal Solution Architect. So at Anstack, we always believed that transparency is the key to go. We have made sure we have put enough tooling in place for us internally as well as externally for our customers. We are able to provide the stats they need about what's happening in the project, be able to take key decisions based on the data that we collect for productivity boost and all the other efficiency boost that we can get.
Vishwas:So primarily as a project management tool, we've been using Jira. And Preeti, do you want to talk about what features of Jira that you are like and helped us to build further? And how does generative AI features of Jira is helping us?
Preeti:Yeah. So at many projects, have been using Jira as you mentioned, and Jira has been helpful in many ways. There are a lot of features that a lot of people don't really use on a day to day basis but we have at Amstack we have explored that and we've kind of, gotten around you know how we have set automations automations is one of the features on Jira which kind of helps the developers not to come back to you know Jira and move their tickets manually or,
Vishwas:you
Preeti:know, how, we can track when they've started the work and when they're gonna be ending the work. All these automation tools have actually helped me to track. As a project manager, it has helped me to track when and where the tickets are moving. And other than that, there are Jira there is a feature called Jira Insights, which was released recently. And it has been actually been very helpful to know where the bottlenecks are at.
Preeti:How we can, you know, where the tickets are stuck, where, you know, who is spending a lot more time on which ticket and if there is any action items that is required to, you know, kind of, go forward with those tickets or if we are blocked anywhere. So all these, insights have kind of helped us to know how we want to proceed further in the projects and it has made our lives a lot more easier and for the developers they don't need to ever come back to Jira and for me it is always like I don't have to conduct a daily stand up every single day even if somebody you know doesn't join I know what they are doing and where they are at, because of all these automations so that has made my life a lot more easier
Vishwas:understandable Do you is Jira insights be able to give you an idea of who is blocked by who, what kind of dependency each other have within the team?
Preeti:Yes. Jira insights actually does provide a lot of understanding about where the team is at, where whose if there is a for example, if there is a design dependency, if there is a ticket, saying the design design needs to be completed on certain feature, then you know, you know exactly, okay, this is where I'm blocked at and this is why we are not able to progress further on that particular feature. So it has kind of brought a complete transparency to the team as well, and they know, who has to pick up what. And because we do the planning part as well. Right?
Preeti:We use planning poker for the planning part, which is where we realize, okay, this is how people have to pick up. This is how, you know, this is the order of tickets that have to be picked up. And additionally, Jira Insights does tell you where people are stuck, what we have to do to move forward.
Vishwas:Perfect. And how does that work with error reporting? Because I believe our customers are not going to use Jira to report their bugs, But how does it come into Jira?
Preeti:Yeah, so some of our customers do use Jira. Some of them are onboarded onto Jira which does give them the transparency. But for people who are not onboarded on Jira, you know, we use a tool called Canny. This has been extremely helpful to kind of get the feedback from our customers and, you know, wherever they require features, wherever they require, wherever they see bugs on production, staging, any environment that we are talking about. If they see any bugs, they can report it directly to us and we can interlink it to Jira where you don't have to go, you know, manually create all these tickets on Jira if you feel the bug that has been raised or the feature that has been raised by the customers.
Preeti:It is fair. You can just pick it up and integrate. There is an integration on Kani and Jira which is interlinking both of the platforms and you can just create a issue or link it to any of the existing issues that are there in your Jira backlog. Perfect. So that has kind of made our lives so much more easier because every single time we don't have to go back to the customers and take a list on Excel and then come back and create or dump the data into Jira.
Preeti:We don't have to do that because everything is tracked and whenever any, bug or issue or feature has been closed on Jira, automatically it is mapped and here use the even the customers even us we receive a report whenever it is moved to in progress whenever it is closed it automatically moves on Kanny as well which is
Vishwas:I believe that will give the customer also the heads up as to when they can expect these on
Preeti:the Yes. So, there are road map features on Kani as well which is kind of great because we let them know that, you know, this is what is upcoming and we start working on those and once that is completed, everybody receives an email saying whoever has raised the issue also receives an email saying this issue has been closed once you're done.
Vishwas:Perfect. And I think another thing the developer side of that being a solution architect probably is how does it go from here? Because you mentioned something interesting that we found out during this time is we knew the tickets were moving. We knew the estimates were being made, But what does how does that link to GitHub? Right?
Vishwas:So I think while we discussed, we we figured out there are tools that can bring all of this data together because we are currently using GitHub. And whenever there is a feature being built or a bug being fixed, they work on it on a feature branch and created create a PR and somebody will click, you know, review that pull request and merge it. Now we have the data of, okay, that task actually picked up, got created up, they made a commit, they created a pull request and got merged. And similar story exist on the Jira as well. Right?
Vishwas:So we've been we've I think probably had a lot of discussions as to how do we get these data together. I think that's where we figured there are platforms at DevDynamics. That's something we've been using for a long time now where it brought in because you mentioned the PRs mentioning the PR that, okay, this is the Jira task that it was intended to resolve. What we ended up having is the correlation between okay, there was a task being created. It was probably a story that was three story points worth.
Vishwas:Right? Then, you know, during the planning calls, you put that effort, somebody picked it up. The moment there is a first commit being created, it starts recording. Okay. This is the Devodynamics would know.
Vishwas:Okay. This is the first commit, you know, time of commit. Yeah. And then they work on it. They create a PR.
Vishwas:It gets assigned to somebody. Take take lead in our example. Right? So it it then goes to somebody reviewing it and merging it. That's when Jira also knows, okay, the street story point ticket got created a commit say a day ago and then got merged, reviewed and merged within a day.
Vishwas:That has a great correlation between the actuals versus estimation. I think that probably is the most useful insight and the correlation between Jira and GitHub. How does that help you or, you know, looking at that, how that has made your life easy in the perspective of project manager?
Preeti:Yeah. So, there are a lot of metrics that we receive on this dashboard, that DevDynamics dashboard that we're talking about. So, it has made my life a lot more simpler to know where the bottlenecks are at, you know. For example, there there have been instances where a PR has been kind of, stuck with, I mean, it has been stuck with one person reviewing it and because of that, the cycle time kind of increases from you know just a one day turnaround time it goes to like you know two three days turnaround time and, because of this dashboard where you know I I feel and I know okay it's not supposed to take two to three days just to review a PR right once it has been raised and it it is required to merge it has to go through seamlessly it cannot be in review for two to three days and just stay there.
Vishwas:The moment it takes for more time, the developer will also lose the context. If there is some suggestion being made after two days, they will have to switch context. I think we'll also lose a lot of context switch time in
Preeti:that process. Actually
Vishwas:Literally, you know
Preeti:Yes. So as down the productivity. Yes, as you're mentioning, as soon as the PR is raised, it is easier for them to kind of, go back to it and make changes if there are any, if there are any, you know, items that are sent across in the review. So, it is always, I mean for me it has always provided that context the DevDynamics has provided that context and because of this we're able to kind of you know, tell where the PR has kind of been held and also if a person is getting overburdened by this particular like reviewing the PR. Only one person if only one person is kind of reviewing the PR, it beats the kind of purpose where we are bringing in transparency across the team.
Preeti:Right? Yeah. Everybody needs to know if somebody is working on this, if there are multiple people getting involved in it, they know what the feature entails and what in the future if they have to work on this it is always easier. So, that is where we kind of, knew there was a problem and, it was taking two to three days and it gave us that kind of data and then from there onwards, we kind of used that insight to, kind of distribute the PR to multiple people rather than just one person handling it. So it was it is a it has been very useful.
Preeti:Like, we use this on multiple, projects as well and this has kind of been very useful for us to move forward without blocking
Vishwas:Yep. Yep. PRs. I think the speaking of insights, probably took key takeaways or insights that I've been loving on DevDynamics is, you know, shout out to them is one probably since we have like in our setup, the general project setup that we do, you mentioned the bug gets reported on Kany, it comes to Jira, somebody picks it up, creates a PR, it gets merged then it goes to production. Right?
Vishwas:Because it comes through Kany and then it goes to Jira. Now, GitHub picks it up and then it get merged. Now all of this is tracked on DevDynamics. So DevDynamics gives this generic insight or a stat called mean time to recovery. So from the time of it being created as a bug and from us to a level where we resolve it, we have the complete recovery time.
Vishwas:That gives us a way more insight as to how we can better the process, how we are, how fast we are, you know, helping the customers to resolve their bugs. Because some of the bugs can be blockers, you know, customers probably might not be able to use a certain feature that we have built for them. Right? So that I think is a one of the great link or flow of journey of a ticket or journey of a bug that I've seen. Secondly, you know, as a solution architect or as somebody who is on the leadership because I get asked, okay, how this project is doing technically as well as you know on a management side and there is not a lot of measurement that you can collect by going into these dashboard yourself and try to give a you know measurable input to somebody who is in a leadership.
Vishwas:Meet customer, internal leadership. Right? So what Diode Dynamics which I think we've been looking at is an email report. It what it does is it has all these insights that you mentioned. It puts puts them all together, put generates using generative AI.
Vishwas:I think it uses OpenAI under the hood. So it generates a very summarized report and sends it via email every two weeks. And it also tells about okay what progress we made some of them start aggregated data as to okay what is our cycle time has been the meantime to recovery and how many PRs being reviewed
Preeti:and also gives you deployment frequency.
Vishwas:Yes, frequency of deployments that will give us how productive we have been, how much deployments that we've been doing on a weekly basis. And I think the other aspect of that is also it also points you to okay this is where you're failing and again it has to be taken you know with a pinch of salt but it has given us suggestions as to okay this PR has been open for two to three days now and the number of PR reviews by one person has been more than the other peers who might as well as any to other people so that there is no bottleneck. Those kind of suggestions has been very useful for us because we are not having to spend time in terms of why the issue is and trying to you know, the suggestive pieces are rather helping for us to experiment and figure out how does this help to, you know, do the productivity boost.
Preeti:Yeah. On that note, actually, as a project manager, I've kind of found it to be very useful for me, like, because I mean, if you go and see a bunch of charts on any dashboard, you will not understand how to read it. In the first place, you need to be able to know how to read all these charts. You will be thrown a lot of data. You'll be given a lot of data, if you go into that dashboard.
Preeti:But then if you don't know how to read it, there is no point. Like, you can't give it to, you know, whoever has to consume it. You can't give it to them. So what DevDynamics has actually done on their platform, which I love, is, you know, they have given a descriptive explanation for each of the metrics that they are showing. Along with it, there's always an AI, feature that is associated and it gives a prompt like immediately when you click on it, it gives a prompt saying, you know what, this is how you need to read this data.
Preeti:This is how your your data should I mean this is how it the ideal, points should be and this is where you are. Is where you are currently in your project and because of this any person who's accessing this platform will be able to read that data and also be able to consume it.
Vishwas:Yep.
Preeti:So that is one of the best features that they have incorporated. And as you mentioned it sends out an email at at the end of every sprint because of that you know you kind of receive a boost also if you're doing good your entire team you can share it with the entire team and say you know what hey we are doing this well. If you are not doing something, good. You will take it with a pinch of salt like you said and we probably work on improving it and the next time when you receive the email where you improved on it, it feels great. Yep.
Preeti:Again. Right? It is a cycle. So, it is actually been like a boost for the entire team whenever we receive emails that says we are doing good.
Vishwas:Yep. So, yep. Yep. You know, I think we've been talking about the development process and the management process. One key thing probably, you know, we would want to share as well with the listeners is, you know, how the first phase of all of this has been in terms of documentation, requirement Because most of our project have a lot of documentation in place, be it as a requirement, be it as a development process.
Vishwas:So, you know, I know that we are using Notion, but I have not spent a lot of time on it to understand what these are. I've spent I've seen some features. So do you mind giving me a brief as to, you know, how we are managing these things and what kind of features that Notion has that is making your life easy?
Preeti:Yeah. So I think most of people who are working on projects will know it is tedious to kind of get into documentation all the time. Like, there are hefty documents. There are hefty Google Docs that are sent to us all the time. Right?
Preeti:Like, the requirements that are like technical documents. There are so many things that come into play. And there are so many action items as well on each side. Like, it's not just on our side. There'll be dependencies on the client side.
Preeti:There'll be dependencies on the internal side. There'll be dependencies on vendor sides. So many things. Right? So it has like, Notion has made my life so much more easier to track all these documents, but because first of all, everything can be converted into pages.
Preeti:Yep. Everything has its own pages. Right? Yep. And every page can have its own action items, everything.
Preeti:Like, you know, I can tag anybody and say, you know what? This has to be done. Mhmm. On this particular, date, this is what we discussed and this has to be done. So, like, whenever I have any action items or anything to have to be done or MOMs that have to be shared, everything is well documented in one place and everything can be linked back to, you know, the root of the document and said Mhmm.
Preeti:You know, this is where you will find all the documents related to this particular, conversation that we had or this is where if you have, you know, multiple change requests or anything, you can document it extremely well because you get to create and share all these change requests and get sign off from the clients on the same place.
Vishwas:Yeah. I think managing any project change request probably is the most important thing. Right? And I remember one of the, you know, stories is we were discussing a feature and we didn't know when a certain decision had been taken on a feature. So we went to I think Notion has this feature of search which is powered by AI.
Preeti:Yeah.
Vishwas:So I went there and I literally searched, you know, when was this feature discussed. It gave me a brief of, okay, there is here's this MOM and here is what the customer said. This is how it's going to be on. This is how it should be built. I think that's primarily where, you know, it blew my mind.
Vishwas:Okay. This was easy. I it would have been very different story if we hadn't found this.
Preeti:Yeah. So if if, say, if you were going with a traditional approach and putting it all on drive and, Google Docs and everything, it would be places where you could probably search, but then it is a lot more difficult to run through so many documents at the same time. Right? This search has made everybody's life so much more easier. And so for the, you know, developers, designers to document their, journey on the platform, like, on the projects that they're working on or if they're ideating something and they want to go back to why they did what they did in a particular way.
Preeti:It is so much more easier. You know everything. Like, you know everything is in one place and if you want to, you know, look at you can put all your deployment strategies also onto this. And if somebody has to, you know, kind of, say for example, somebody has to do the deployment today. Anybody can go into it and just search for deployment.
Preeti:You know, how do I do this deployment? And they'll get entire
Vishwas:Yeah.
Preeti:Thing, entire feature or entire flow on how to do this. Yep. And that is like that has made everybody's lives easier on, the multiple projects that we use Notion on. So perfect.
Vishwas:Yeah. Perfect. I think these are just a few tools that we've been experimenting with, but, you know, as you go along and as the whole boost on the generative AI that has been put in every platform we use and new tools are being built every day I think that's primarily probably another way with respect to productivity, respect to how you manage a project and documentation. You just have to keep exploring, add these tools, experiment with them and see how these are going to help everybody. At the end of the day for developers, for managers, for everybody, it's primarily the time and amount of repetitive things they end up doing.
Vishwas:If anything that solves it, I think that's primarily our agenda at Anstack to make everybody's lives easy, keep everything transparent and have measurable, you know, numbers that you can show and improve us on. Alright, I think that was it for today. Thanks for watching. Know, keep coming back for more content like this. Thank you.
Preeti:Thank you.