
GitHub Insights - blackrobot
https://github.com/features/insights
======
sergioisidoro
What is going on here? A lot of the comments on this thread seem to be
confusing bad management with metric visibility. And it seems they would
prefer to bury the metrics so they are not used to "snitch out" on people.
Looks like a mix of dishonesty and toxic culture at work.

We basically built these metrics with Prometheus and grafana because our
review queue kept growing. Now we keep everyone accountable, and make these
metrics part of our stand-up meetings.

Our PR queue is now smaller, and review time is shorter. We use these metrics
not to point fingers, but to ensure people are not overcommitting, overworked,
and that people know how many things they have on their table.

I'm quite glad something like this is now available off the shelf

~~~
ryanwaggoner
_We use these metrics not to point fingers, but to ensure people are not
overcommitting, overworked, and that people know how many things they have on
their table._

Perhaps people have little faith in most management, and expect that tools
like this _will_ be used to point fingers.

You're not wrong about misuse of these tools being a symptom of bad
management, but if 90% of the management in an industry is inclined to misuse
such tools, it's reasonable to be dismayed when those tools are made more
widely available.

~~~
sergioisidoro
You're right, it's reasonable to be dismayed, but imho not so reasonable to
want to keep the metrics hidden.

Feels like we, as an industry, already had this conversation in infosec - abot
security by obfuscation - which has some parallels here. The conclusion was
that hiding things is generally a bad solution to the underlying problems.

~~~
ric2b
This has nothing to do with security by obscurity. There aren't
hundreds/thousands of anonymous managers probing into your teams metrics
trying to find the single metric that will defeat your team.

------
sytse
For people who want to compare GitHub Insights to GitLab please consider
looking at GitLab Insights
[https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/insights/](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/insights/)
Code Review Analytics
[https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/analytics/code_review_analyt...](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/analytics/code_review_analytics.html)
DevOps Score
[https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/instance_statistics/dev_ops_...](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/instance_statistics/dev_ops_score.html)
and Value Stream analytics
[https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/analytics/value_stream_analy...](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/analytics/value_stream_analytics.html)
and a few others listed in [https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2020/05/06/git-
challenge/](https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2020/05/06/git-challenge/)

------
aupright
For those worried about the data being used maliciously, it looks like most of
the metrics they'll be introducing are focused around things that can actually
help unblock teams and aren't focused on individual contributors. Eg.
distribution of code reviews across team members for better load balancing,
average code review turnaround times across the team.

It also looks like you'll be able to proactively set goals for some of these
insights as well to improve over time. I can see where this can go awry, but
optimistically this should help teams better measure and improve their
process!

~~~
developer2
Nope, fuck this.

The moment a product mentions "From developer to CEO" (ie. includes the word
"CEO"), this is bad news. As soon as you introduce _any_ metrics involving
"participation awards" (whether based on lines of code, commits, reviews/pull-
requests, etc.), the company is doomed to fail at understanding how
productivity/worth is measured in the development world.

The fact they even _mention_ "CEO" in their tagline is all one needs to know.
There is not a single CEO in the world who should give a goddamn shit about
actions taken at the source control or release level. It's all marketing
drivel intended to promise management that the product being sold can somehow
deliver insight into a world they will never understand. The fact is
developers will just waste time inflating their metrics to satisfy
productivity algorithms, while costing the business time–and therefore
money–developers could have spent _actually_ improving the product.

~~~
swagonomixxx
I'm inclining on agreeing. Gaming commit counts and commit graphs on GitHub is
already a thing. I've been asked by many recruiters why my commit graph on
GitHub has gone stale, when I've worked at places that don't use GitHub, or if
my commits are 99% of the time towards private repositories.

I can already see the resumes of developers touting their statistical
brilliance from metrics gained from this tool. It's not a world I want to be a
part of, to be honest.

~~~
boobsbr
For the past 10 years I worked for companies with NDA and exclusivity clauses
in the contracts.

I can only describe what I worked on superficially, I cannot contribute to
other projects because all code I produce (even off-hours) that has my name
attached to it is company property.

My GitHub and BitBucket profiles are bare, save for bug reports.

Every time I get interviewed I have to explain why my résumé is not more
detailed and why I don't contribute to the open source community.

------
brynary
CEO of Code Climate here. We have a product Velocity
([https://codeclimate.com/](https://codeclimate.com/)) which offers what we
call Engineering Intelligence. There's some great discussion about the value
and appropriate use of data in software engineering, so I thought I'd chime
in.

What we've seen is that engineers inherently want to be productive, and are
happiest when they can work friction-free. Unfortunately, it can be quite
difficult to get visibility into roadblocks that slow down developers (e.g.
overly nitpicky code review, late changing product requirements, slow/flaky
CI), especially for managers who are one or two levels removed from
programming. These are situations where data-backed insights can be helpful
for diagnosis.

After diagnosing issues, with data or simply qualitative insights from a
retrospective or 1:1, we also see teams sometimes struggle to set goals and
achieve desired improvements. A common theme is the recurring retrospective
item that people agree is important but doesn't seem to be resolved. When it
comes to implementing improvements, data can be useful to make objectives
concrete and make progress visible to the entire team.

It’s important that metrics do not become the objectives themselves, but
rather serve as a way to demonstrate the true outcome was achieved. Metrics
also are not a strategy, and quantitative data cannot be used alone to
understand performance of teams.

When quantitative data is used properly in combination with qualitative
information, strong communication, and trust, we’ve found the results can go
beyond what can be achieved without metrics.

~~~
stephc_int13
> It’s important that metrics do not become the objectives themselves

How do you achieve that?

I've always seen the exact opposite.

It is very tempting to measure things, use more data to better understand the
world, and in this case, the state of a project.

But you can't. The world is too complex, too rich, too noisy.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation)

~~~
brynary
This HBR article "Many Strategies Fail Because They’re Not Actually
Strategies", while not entirely about metrics, has some great recommendations
for how leaders can avoid these pitfalls:

[https://hbr.org/2017/11/many-strategies-fail-because-
theyre-...](https://hbr.org/2017/11/many-strategies-fail-because-theyre-not-
actually-strategies)

Their top recommendations are: A) Communicate the logic behind what you are
trying to achieve; B) Make strategy execution a two-way process, not top-down;
C) Let selection happen organically, through systems that cause strong
initiatives to rise up to to the top; D) Find ways to make change the default,
to help move beyond the status quo and existing habits

------
stephc_int13
Wow, things are getting a bit clearer now.

Am I paranoid?

For me this the signal that it's time to opt-out from vscode and github.

I was really impressed with the work done on vscode, the performance was
really good for a hosted web-app.

Also:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law)

------
minimaxir
This might be used more for narc'ing on unproductive coders than for
productivity. :P

------
nimish
Yuck, when metrics become a target they cease to be useful.

~~~
williamdclt
But metrics _are_ useful, which is what this is.

Devs complain about exec picking irrelevant metrics to evaluate them (and
they're right), but what I see even more often is teams full of inefficiencies
that like being a black box and don't want to make an effort to introspect and
self-improve. Often they're barely teams, they are just a collection of devs
working on the same thing

I'm happy this tool exist and I'm sure my team will be better off because of
it.

------
mgoblu3
Is this what they did with the PullPanda acquisition? We had started using
that a bit, but not being able to add new users as of late and the general
pause in feature development seemed like something else was up.

~~~
tyre
This. A million times this.

There is currently no way to get notifications when you're assigned as a
reviewer or when someone reviews your code.

I have the Github app on my phone and they don't alert me! I want a slack
integration that feeds my activity to me.

It's nuts. Absolutely bonkers. How is this not a thing.

~~~
geoffharcourt
This exists now with GitHub and PullReminders. I get a Slack message whenever
I'm requested or someone finishes a review I requested.

~~~
tyre
From their site:

    
    
        Can new users and organizations still sign up?
        
        Pull Panda is no longer accepting new sign ups.

~~~
geoffharcourt
They moved a bunch of it to Github out of PullReminders yesterday. I would go
to your personal settings in GH and look at "Scheduled Reminders", which is
where the old PullReminders functionality got moved. It's possible it's only
there for pre-acquisition users, but that's where it should end up if it's
generally available now.

------
nitsky
“Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft
building progress by weight.”

\- Bill Gates

------
abtinf
Let the metrics gaming begin.

~~~
dugmartin
I always think of this Dilbert strip when I see developer metrics tools for
managers:

[https://dilbert.com/strip/1995-11-13](https://dilbert.com/strip/1995-11-13)

~~~
WrtCdEvrydy
Oh god, that is very true.

I feel like I'm the guy in the comics who takes advantage because they tried
to roll out something like this in my work and I figured out you could get
more points by sinking other teams than actually writing code.

After voicing it in a meeting, it magically went away.

------
gumby
Data yes, "insight"...not so much.

------
SimonLH
Well, there's a new alternative on the market:
[http://sigmetic.io](http://sigmetic.io)

It's currently in beta, but it looks really cool!!

Kindest regard Founder of Sigmetic ;p

------
prepend
I wish it would give web traffic for public repos going back more than two
weeks.

------
glram
Ah I was hoping based on the headline that this would be some sort of analysis
of the actual code -- aka a pie graph of the different language features each
team member uses. Kinda like an aggregated `blame` :D

------
kfk
In app insights are always tricky. The moment you need to compare this data
with non GitHub data you need to move to an external database anyway.

------
dom96
Is this why my private repos have disabled all insights? I can't even look at
pretty charts of commits I've been making anymore :(

------
novarro
Sigh, there goes the product i was working on since last three months. This
has most of the features i was planning to implement.

------
oefrha
Looks like the expansion of an old feature that’s been tucked away in the
corner for years? Insights -> Pulse.

------
ken
If they really had guts, they'd ask programmers to declare their background
(years of experience, with that language, with static/dynamic typed languages,
...) and environment (private office / open floorplan / remote, music /
silence / white noise, ...), and use this to settle once-and-for-all some
basic questions the industry has had.

------
mythshaker
they debuted this as part of the enterprise offerings but it doesn't seem
nearly as robust as gitprime (RIP) or code climate velocity

~~~
onecup
Which is a good thing IMO. Tools like gitprime and code climate are plagued
with vanity metrics.

~~~
moises_silva
I am researching these kind of tools at the moment, and, although I'm not
convinced myself yet, I am curious to learn. What kind of vanity metrics are
gitprime and code climate plagued with?

------
jrochkind1
Oh no.

