Case study #2
Improving development productivity by enriching processes and communication within the team
2022 Zigi.Ai Ltd.
This case study is about improving development productivity; the product reduces cycle time by ~65% by enhancing processes and communication within the team.
I started by interviewing and researching the workflows in different development teams. Based on their needs, I improved the daily message for developers and prototyped Slack-based tools such as live notifications for PR review, connecting code to tasks, etc. These tools went into development and are continuously improved based on user data and feedback.
After talking with the development team, I understood different workflows. Every developer/team works differently; each workflow has different requirements. The core of all ideas was to lower what developers need to talk about - like asking for a PR review, notifying when they finish a task, etc.
When exploring the current daily message, I understood its main issues - too much information, unclear information such as actions, timeframe, events, kind of items, etc. I moved from long awkward message to short, clear quick actions in two sections.
When I joined the team, the main product was the daily message for developers:
When exploring the current daily message, I understood its main issues - too much information, unclear information such as actions, timeframe, events, types of items, etc. I moved from long awkward messages to short, clear quick actions in two sections.
After several versions, each tested and reviewed by users, we came up with a new version:
The second stage of the work was to produce tools for automatic actions that would replace information spoken or written and give the user essential information to enhance the development process.
To prevent team leaders needing to ask or the problem of indirectly discovering delays, we created messages that reach the team leader and update them on tasks or code reviews that are stuck in one of their team members’ workflow.
Developers use “pull requests” in day-to-day work to initiate integrating new code changes into the main project repository. During this PR life cycle, they ask for a review and approval from teammates, and review and approve others' code. Each team/devs asks for this differently, via talking, writing messages, using code management, etc.
These "Zigi" messages help "move the ball from one to the other" in the PR flow - it's live messages that explainPR needs, such as "PR needs review", "PR commented", "PR merged", etc.
The implementation of Zigi into companies resulted in teams/devs who used the product having significant improvement in their productivity.
Zigi implemented the product with 280 users in 70 companies (as of Nov 2020). In these companies, the daily use of various features was 65%.
We examined usage for Zigi’s users who performed the most actions with the product over two months, compared with their previous two months not using Zigi. Here is what we found regarding the reduction in PR cycle time. In the users who used Zigi, the average improvement was 75% reduction in cycle time.
