2018 Excellence Awards Entry: Born to Run - Automated Agile KPIs
Name: Luke Light
Title: Born to Run: Automated Agile KPIs
Company: Alteryx (internal)
Collaborators: Jen Dineen
Overview of Use Case:
A walk-through of devmetrics.alteryx.com, an intranet site powered by an array of servers to track, interpret, and share progress metrics across our Agile environment.
- Automation – Using Alteryx to perform scheduled pulls from an AP
- Dev / PM Collaboration – building visuals to the specs of various stakeholders
- Sharing Results in a Production Environment – hosting dashboards on the web
Describe the business challenge or problem you needed to solve:
Tracking and reporting project status is traditionally fraught with unwarranted optimism and subjective judgement, leading to inaccurate reporting. Due to these challenges, Program Management created an internal website -- a single source of truth for development metrics in our own Agile environment.
Describe your working solution:
Alteryx Products: Alteryx Designer and Alteryx Server -- mostly YXDB data sources (API extracts).
Repeatable Workflows: hourly API calls scheduled every hour, aggregating reports, apps on the Alteryx Gallery to manually update dashboards, In-Database tools for our Redshift database, visuals through Alteryx Charting (original) and R, and publishing to Tableau Server.
Steps for our solution:
- set parameters with lookup tables
- call Rally (Agile development management system) data from API
- iterative and batch macros to iterate across multiple teams
- aggregate data into useful, lightweight metrics
- publish metrics to Tableau for visualization (some charts in R and Designer)
Describe the benefits you have achieved:
Our process (powered by Alteryx) gives management a reliable view into our development process -- by trending progress, diagnostics, and catered content (created in collaboration with many teams across the org), we have a much clearer understanding of the needs of our developers and setting reasonable expectations for management.
Related Resources
Slide deck (presented at Inspire 2018) attached.
devmetrics.alteryx.com
