icecrime

7 ms·

1.
by icecrime 4y ago
Most tools in this space are about the efficiency of the development flow, sometimes down to the individual's level. With Echoes we're trying a different angle which is less about the efficiency of the process, and more about the
2.
by icecrime 4y ago
Absolutely! We have among our customers a YC company who uses Echoes exactly for that purpose. Their issue was that every two weeks during all-hands, engineering would present a list of merged GitHub pull requests which everyone would appla
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by icecrime 4y ago
Interestingly we originally designed the product for companies of 50 engineers and above, but we quickly had to add a self-serve onboarding as we were seeing unexpected interest from startups as small as 6 engineers. I think there are two d
4.
by icecrime 4y ago
That's not currently in the plan, but as Echoes models the engineering organization you could easily see how much of your engineering capacity goes toward maintenance versus new features. I'd be happy to show you a demo of the pro
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by icecrime 4y ago
Our model of a unit of effort typically originates from a commit. Deployments are declared through an API: because we already know the commits, and most importantly their intents, this tells us what a given release aims to achieve. The next
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by icecrime 4y ago
I certainly hope too, especially as those teams are typically at the crossroads of every initiative and therefore unfairly perceived as "what is slowing us down" rather than "what carries everything else". Echoes can shi
7.
by icecrime 4y ago
At this point Echoes doesn't let you connect goals to actual metrics. In other words: we measures efforts invested into the goals, but not the observable impact of these efforts (yet!). Your question is however absolutely spot on as th
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by icecrime 4y ago
Thank you! :)
9.
Launch HN: Echoes HQ (YC S21) – Developer-friendly activity reports
96 points by icecrime 4y ago|17 comments
10.
The disconnect between planning and execution(echoeshq.com)
1 points by icecrime 5y ago|0 comments
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by icecrime 5y ago
You're right. I made a generalization out of multiple threads here on HN and on Twitter (another example coming to mind being this one https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1440242068102680595 ), but only ch
12.
by icecrime 5y ago
Hi, author here! Appreciate the comment, we'll work on our copy. Most companies have a quarterly planning cycle which starts with setting goals, ends with collecting results, and in middle is most often a blurry mess of juggling betwee
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The Ticketing Conundrum(echoeshq.com)
1 points by icecrime 5y ago|0 comments
14.
by icecrime 5y ago
Thank you!:-)
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by icecrime 5y ago
Thank you! We have tons of ideas of where this product could go, but I can stay with good confidence that IC performance management is not one of them: I don’t believe that this is something that can nor should be automated. If you look clo
16.
by icecrime 5y ago
We don’t filter on branches, so any merged work counts. By default all pull requests are considered equally weighted, but there’s a set of labels that allow you to optionally influence that weighting (using basic XS to XL t-shirt sizing), s
17.
by icecrime 5y ago
You are correct that you could achieve similar activity reports with JIRA epics but it requires a level of rigor and homogeneity that I believe is hard to achieve in practice. 1. JIRA most often captures what we _plan_ to do rather than wha
18.
by icecrime 5y ago
Great question :) There are several answers to it. 1. We integrate with the GitHub Checks API and surface missing labels as a failure (similar to failed tests), which acts as a reminder to add the labels. GitLab doesn't have an equival
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by icecrime 5y ago
Thank you! It is important: there's so much potential wasted in suboptimal organizations, and no amount of engineering productivity can compensate for that.
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by icecrime 5y ago
Thank you Matt!
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by icecrime 5y ago
Thank you, and yes! We only account for contributors who are dispatched into teams within Echoes configuration. This is also meant for open source projects who don’t want to track contributions from the community, or for very large organiza
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by icecrime 5y ago
Thank you Nick! Age old problem indeed, which is why we believe that trying something different is way overdue :-)
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by icecrime 5y ago
Thank you JJ! Indeed, most engineers care about their impact and how their work contribute to the big picture. Unfortunately, the incentives structure in many companies in not designed to encourage that. That's why we're trying to
24.
by icecrime 5y ago
Thank you! We do get asked about alerts, both on metrics (as in your example) and on allocation (for example when the activity is significantly and durably diverging from the current expectations). We haven’t started work on this but it’s v
25.
by icecrime 5y ago
Hi HN! I’m Arnaud, founder of Echoes HQ ( https://echoeshq.com ). We build dashboards on the activity of engineering teams, focusing on the value of engineering work. I’m passionate about developer empowerment and building enginee