Daily Update

Track the evolution of your team’s velocity sprint over sprint. Find out where yesterday’s work focus went and direct your efforts to accomplish your goals. The Daily Update is a great way to communicate with the team as a source of transparency and also to prompt the manager or scrum master to realign expectations with key stakeholders.

How to use the Daily Update feature:

The Daily Update is most commonly used in daily standups and can quickly help your team surface discussion around blockers in the code they are working in. The Daily Update report includes a breakdown of commit activity across our four work types: New Work, Legacy Refactoring, Help Others, and Churn.

Gauging velocity

This breakdown helps engineer’s surface more specific discussion around the work they achieved yesterday. If an individual realized that they had to do more replatforming than expected to deliver a new feature, this is a great natural way to communicate this to the team as a source of transparency and also to prompt the manager or scrum master to realign expectations with key stakeholders if a timeline feels like it needs to be pushed out an iteration or two.

Spotting blockers

Another dynamics that you can visualize in the Daily Update are potential blockers in the code. This is an incredibly fast way to showcase the changes themselves so they can quickly pull the team and identify the individual that has the bandwidth and domain knowledge to get them unblocked at 9:30 AM rather than spending all day trying to figure it out and burning almost a whole day of time that could have been allocated elsewhere.

The Daily Update report allows you to streamline that process and provide your team with an effective medium to speak towards more granular blockers or curiosities in the code base that they would like to get their team’s input on. Now you can communicate to your team that they have another source of information at their fingertips to describe blockers in the code base solutions they are creating.

Incorporating into the workflow

Knowing how to incorporate these reports into your standups can help take the burden off your team to give you status updates consistently. It will help you identify where you can help earlier or know when there are broader systemic issues at hand. It’ll help you identify opportunities for coaching, cross-training, and praise, so you can consistently grow a healthy and high performing engineering team. It can also help you schedule a block of time on your calendar before each standup, so you can get in the habit of reviewing these reports before the meeting and having them open on your device and ready for discussion.