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| Category | Value Stream Management |
|---|---|
| Stage | Manage |
| Group | Optimize |
| Maturity | Minimal |
| Content Last Reviewed | 2022-01-10 |
Thanks for visiting the Value Stream Management direction page. This page is actively maintained by the Optimize group. You can contribute or provide feedback by:
Value Stream Management helps organizations more quickly recognize the value of their innovations in two ways:
Counter-productive local optimizations are a natural result of a limited field-of-view. By creating situational awareness informed by analytics and value-stream thinking, we give every GitLab user the superpower of extraordinary insight and efficiency.
Many software organizations struggle with a lack of insight into how effective they are at delivering value to end users. We aim to fix this.
GitLab's broader vision, as a Value Stream Delivery Platform, is to replace DevOps toolchains with a single application that is pre-configured to work by default across the entire DevOps lifecycle.
"Cycle time compression may be the most underestimated force in determining winners & losers in tech." - Marc Andreesen
The category of Value Stream Management helps software organizations understand and optimize the impact of their activities across the DevOps lifecycle by:
To achieve this vision, Value Stream Analytics (VSA) will be the hub for analytics in GitLab. VSA provides a high-level overview of end-to-end cycle and stage times and a starting point for drilling down into each stage of a value stream to identify opportunities for improvements.
In addition to the custom value streams that can be built in VSA, the Optimize group maintains GitLab Insights, which supports further customization to show the type, velocity, and quality of work.
For Value Stream Management, we are targeting the following personas (in priority order):
The main jobs-to-be-done we focus on for Value Stream Management are:
Learn: When I am new to value stream practices; I want to learn what’s important, why it’s important and how to use it, so that I can use the tool effectively and adapt to my organisation’s needs.
Map: When I am establishing practices to measure my value stream, I want to define the flow of work required to ship value to my end users so that we can visualize how efficiently and reliably value is delivered.
Deliver: When I am moving work items through my value stream, I want to quickly identify stagnant and outlier work items in real-time, so that my team can unblock them and improve our performance.
Optimize: When I am optimizing my value stream and its stages, I want to understand trends and common bottlenecks, so that I can identify areas that need improvement, experiment with new practices, measure success, and learn from other successful teams.
Evaluate: When my organization is adopting new DevOps practices, I want to track the impact of changes, so that I can understand return on investment(ROI) and report to leadership on the value of our DevOps transformation.
The team is currently focused on our SaaS first theme.
GitLab's success has translated into tremendous user growth, both for our self-managed and SaaS offerings. We are working on supporting security, scale and performance across the Manage stage and will not be focused on expanding feature work on this category in this quarter.
This category is currently Minimal. Our next step is Viable (see epic). You can read more about GitLab's maturity framework here.
TaskTop is exclusively focused on Value Stream Management and allows users to connect more than 50 tools together, including Atlassian's JIRA, GitLab, GitHub, JamaSoftware, CollabNet VersionOne, Xebia Labs, and TargetProcess to name a few. Tasktop serves as an integration layer on top of all the software development tools that a team uses and allows for mapping of processes and people in order to achieve a common data model across the toolchain. End users can visualize the flows between the different tools and the data can be exported to a database for visualization through BI tools.
While we understand that not all users of GitLab utilize all of our stages, we believe that there is already a lot of information across planning, source code management and continuous integration and deployment, which can be used to deliver valuable insights.
We are starting to build dashboards, which can help end users visualize a custom-defined value stream flow at a high level and drill down and filter to a specific line of code or MR.
CollabNet VersionOne provides users with the ability to input a lot of information, which is a double edged sword as it can lead to duplication of effort and stale information when feeds are not automated. It does however, allow a company to visualize project streams from a top level with all their dependencies. End users can also create customizable reports and dashboards that can be shared with senior management.
Plutora Analytics seem to target mainly the release managers with their Time to Value Dashboard. The company also integrates with JIRA, Jenkins, GitLab, CollabNet VersionOne, etc but there is still a lot of configuration that seems to be left to the user.
Targetprocess tries to provide a full overview of the delivery process and integrates with Jenkins, GitHub and JIRA. The company also provides customizable dashboards that can give an overview over the process from ideation to delivery.
Although GitPrime doesn't try to provide a value stream management solution, it focuses on productivity metrics and cycle time by looking at the productivity of a team. It exclusively uses only git data.
Naturally, Azure is working on adding analytics that can help engineering teams become more effective but it's still in very early stages. It has also recently acquired PullPanda.
Similarly to GitPrime, Code Climate focuses on the team and uses git data only.
Similarly to GitPrime, Gitalytics focuses on the team and uses git data only.
XebiaLabs' analytics are predominantly focused on the Release Manager and give useful overviews of deployments, issue throughput and stages. The company integrates with JIRA, Jenkins, etc and end users can see in which stage of the release process they are.
CloudBees DevOptics is focused on giving visibility and insights to measure, manage and optimize the software delivery value stream. It allows comparisons across teams and integrates with Jenkins and Jira and SVM /VCS solutions.
CA Agile Central combines data across the planning process in a single integrated page with custom applications available to CA Agile Central users. The applications can be installed in custom pages within CA Agile Central or on a dashboard.
Gartner Market Guide for DevOps Value Stream Delivery Platforms
Forrester's New Wave: Value Stream Management Tools, Q3 2018 uncovered an emerging market with no leaders. However, vendors from different niches of the development pipeline are converging to value stream management in response to customers seeking greater transparency into their processes.
Forrester’s vision for VSM includes:
Other Analysts have highlighted that Gitlab data gathering has much to offer and much more to mine and enable the insight generation. We have an immediate opportunity i to extend the insight generation based on the data gathered in the delivery pipelines. Once this is achieved we will integrate additional data sources beyond the DevOps toolchains.
We have the ability to reach the decision makers that are onsuming the insights generated from the Gitlab platform, and one of the key elements here is getting beyond the DORA 4 metrics into those that are more specifically targeted: security, compliance, financial, product, but also enterprise architecture, AI/ML delivery teams and the like.
Additional functionality, requested by clients includes: