Jellyfish Testimonial | Crux

We're doing our best to implement an agile process, but without having hard metrics to show to our engineers and provide them with feedback on room for improvement, we were agile, but in a sense it was in name only. So we would follow sprints, but we would roll over a significant amount of the work that we committed to, to the next sprint. And that would go on from sprint to sprint to sprint. And sometimes you have things that you committed to that were rolling over, you know, more than 2 sprints. That was one of the most useful metrics that we got from Jellyfish. Being able to hone in on our predictability metrics, our rollover metrics, and have something to hold our teams accountable was really beneficial in, in getting us to where we are now, where we're a lot more agile by having a set velocity and then being able to stay stick to it in our planning sessions. We were really just going off of what Jira provides, which wasn't giving us enough information. When I was looking at how we were doing from sprint to sprint, when we closed something out, I could see our velocity, I could see how many points we closed, and I could see how many points we were rolling over, but I couldn't see what was added to the sprint, how much had been added in, and how much we had taken out and reduced in scope. So those were all metrics that Jellyfish captured, and you could see truly, you know, what your predictability was. It would account for, you know, what had been kicked out halfway through the sprint to the next sprint or moved to the backlog, or, you know, what your sprint addition rate was, how much had been added in. Those were really valuable for us to use. It truly is like night and day. You, you could see the before and after from when we implemented our Jellyfish review calls, where before we were showing the teams the metrics and having a discussion around them, our predictability was terrible. And then after we implemented Jellyfish and started pulling in those metrics, having weekly feedback calls, it drastically improved. So it really was a very useful tool for us to, again, hold our engineering teams accountable when you commit to something in the sprint. You know, we are going to look at how much you are actually delivering and following through on those commitments. And it was like night and day. We were able to achieve between 80 and 90% sprint predictability for most teams within a few months. What I do is I go in and I take a look at our sprint predictability. I take a look at our coding days and I take a look at the sprint edition rate. Because I often find that if our sprint predictability is not where it should be occasionally, it's because we've added in a lot of scope through this, the sprint addition rate. I also use it to see how many features the team is working on at once and what resources were most allocated. So at the beginning of the sprint planning session, we have product come in and they set their priorities and then we're able to look and see, okay, were those priorities actually what the team worked on? If we're working on this feature and that was the top priority, did that get the highest allocation from the team? Then we also look at just what percentage of our resources are going to bugs versus security issues, product innovation versus tech debt. Those are all things, metrics that Jellyfish gives us that we review with the team. So we have those review calls and again, it's just, it really is helpful in facilitating discussion. If we do have a sprint where things didn't go as well as last time, It triggers the conversation that we can have with the tech leads to understand why and how we can improve and be better for next time. So it also kind of just ties into that retrospective process that's so important to Agile. Seeing the team set a velocity and consistently meet it and be predictable has been a big wow moment. The leadership team is really happy to have the metrics that they need to run the business. If we're looking at setting some timelines, right, for to meet client expectations, you have a really predictable sprint. You can look at a sprint and maybe a sprint out, even if it's not fully committed yet, and give a realistic expectation because you know what the team's velocity is and you know that they're predictable. Overall, my time with Jellyfish has been really beneficial. It's helped our teams become more productive and it's helped us achieve our goals, especially leading up to large product launches, because we're able to hone in on where our resources are being allocated to. We've been able to have better planning through accurate sprint predictability, and because we've been able to have more tracking around bugs and turnaround time.