Plandek

Plandek is the essential tool for software teams and leaders

Comments: Overall we are loving this product and excited to continue to ramp up our teams and get them diving deep into the Plandek data to optimize and enhance how they deliver software.

Pros:

I loved how easy it is to setup and get started. Simply point it to your various datasources (eg: JIRA boards, repos, build pipelines) and it'll start collecting data and providing insights. Out-of-the-box dashboards providing an array of useful metrics and insights to help you get started quickly with industry-standard views into software development processes. The Pipeline/Deployment API is a game changer as well; a little more involved to setup, but well worth the time. With this integration, you can track production deployments and tie those deployments back through your SDLC events to understand key metrics related to delivering software. The ability to organize datasets into hierarchical relationships made it really easy to group teams into products / product areas for higher-level views across our organization. The customer service is also excellent; very responsive and willing to listen to our feedback and provide help/support where needed.

Cons:

Nothing really stands out here. The Plandek folks are great and they are eager and willing to incorporate feedback into the future roadmap plans where it makes sense.

Alternatives Considered: Jira

Reasons for Switching to Plandek: Plandek works across data sources to get insights into the plan, build & delivery phases, so it is much more extensive than purely looking at JIRA data. We choose Plandek over GitPrime and other similar vendors because of their unique ability to capture production deployment events, and correlate those events with other data points from the SDLC, providing a true end-to-end view of the engineering process.

Effective Product Development Platform

Comments: CaseWare has been able to gain visibility into the full lead time to value across our bug tracking, code, build, and production systems. We have also implemented a common set of metrics for best practices and lessons learned to be more effectively shared globally.

Pros:

Plandek aggregates data from disparate systems to put together full DORA metrics and many other additional more comprehensive metrics into a single pane of glass. The documentation built into the platform lowers the barrier for all team members to be able to derive value from it's usage.

Cons:

Some connectors to more exotic bug tracking or build environment toolsets are not yet available.

Juan's review

Comments: I see a lot of potential on Plandek, I think Plandek can help us to have a better understanding on things that generally are missed from engineering point of view in order to improve our productivity.
Adopting Plandek forced us as well to define some JIRA standards from our side, so that the information we get from Plandek can be compared on time using the same base, which is good.
In the end I quite like Plandek and it is already having impact on our product, but there are still some changes that will need to happen for us to fully get the value that we expect for having big impact

Pros:

Plandek offers a lot of information gotten from JIRA in a more user friendly way than JIRA itself. Plandek is really flexible and many information can be taken in order to identify areas for improvement in the team

Cons:

Plandek offers a lot of options for tracking multiple useful areas for the business (delivery time, sprint info, tickets, etc), but some of the important things for making this really useful to the final client are missed, eg: I find the LiveView app useful, but there is not much value if I can't define specific levels and raise alerting based on the levels that I specified instead of the one that are pre-defined by Plandek. There are small details that seem to be quick win from me and will really improve the impact of Plandek in my end (like dates flexibility, etc)

Plandek for Software Engineering Delivery

Comments: It was easy for us to see the value of Plandek, and then became easy to pick it up and use it. We've only really explored a fraction of its potential.

Pros:

Plandek is easy to configure/deploy and easy to use, and Plandek give a lot of customer support to help get to grips with the product. For me, this meant that even though we were going through a lot of change (new ways of using Jira, new team structures, etc.) we were still able to use Plandek to get to our metrics.

Cons:

It would be good to be able to control the colours used on metrics (maybe through a colour scheme or style sheet config feature).

Good tool for metrics oriented organization

Pros:

Sprint progress Sprint tickets scope Cycle time Lead time Live View No of tickets created vs completed etc

Cons:

No real time sync with Jira and BitBucket.