Pluralsight Flow

Pluralsight Flow

Rationale

Pluralsight Flow is Fluid Attacks' tool for gaining insights into the development process, both individually and collectively.
The main reasons we chose it over other alternatives are:
  1. It integrates with GitLab, the platform we use to develop our software.
  2. It integrates with GitHub, allowing us to gather metrics from our fully open-source projects like Makes.
  3. It provides efficiency, impact, and complexity metrics based on developers' code contributions.
  4. It sends weekly digests summarizing impact and work focus, while also recognizing relevant commits and contributors.
  5. It allows filtering individual and collective data using both fixed and custom ranges.
  6. It offers a REST API, enabling us to export Pluralsight Flow data to create custom metrics and dashboards in other services like AWS QuickSight.
  7. It integrates with Okta, allowing us to maintain centralized authorization.

Alternatives

The following alternatives were considered but not chosen for the following reasons:
  1. Jellyfish: To take full advantage of the platform, issue tracking must be done in Jira, which leaves us primarily with coding metrics already covered by Pluralsight Flow and GitLab. It has good features related to DevFinOps and engineering focus; however, we currently cover this using GitLab's data in a custom dashboard on AWS QuickSight. The price is the same as Pluralsight Flow's.
  2. LinearB: To take full advantage of the platform, issue tracking must be done in Jira, which leaves us primarily with coding metrics already covered by Pluralsight Flow and GitLab. It offers benchmarking for coding and productivity metrics, but after reviewing relevant publications, we determined that benchmarking is not significant enough to warrant a change in our service, as we have achieved substantial progress in metrics. The price is the same as Pluralsight Flow's.
  3. Swarmia: It does not support GitLab integration.
  4. Allstacks: While it provides good dashboards that utilize heatmaps and bar charts to illustrate a team's active hours, it lacks relevant features compared to Pluralsight Flow and can be 10% to 40% more expensive per contributor.
  5. Keypup: It only offers basic analytics and has no relevant features compared to Pluralsight Flow.
  6. DX: It focuses on qualitative and quantitative insights, using both standard and custom metrics, as well as surveys to track developers' experiences. It can be approximately 20% more expensive per contributor compared to Pluralsight Flow.

Usage

We use Pluralsight Flow for the following purposes:
  1. Gaining insights from engineers, both individually and collectively.
  2. Analyzing efficiency and impact metrics from code contributions made to our repositories.
  3. Obtaining commit insights, including complexity, focus (new work, rework, helping others, legacy refactoring), and frequency (average per day).
  4. Creating custom dashboards and metrics using Pluralsight Flow's data (via REST API).