Cubyts is an AI-powered observability platform that integrates seamlessly with tools teams use (e.g. Jira, GitHub, Figma, Jenkins, etc.) to build their products; the platform enhances the development process with real-time insights, proactive flagging of potential issues, and data-driven decision-making, that ensures superlative Developer, Engineering and Execution excellence.
One of the key features offered by Cubyts is Flags, the Flags feature leverages the data points unearthed by the Cubyts platform to proactively flag issues of different types and provides a resolution path for the issues. If you want to know "What might be going wrong with what my team is doing currently?" the Flags is the place to me for mission critical inferences.
The Cubyts platform supports 4 types and 5 categories of Flags indicating different types of issues (leading to different types of debts, if unresolved), this article covers the same.
Types of Flags:
Process: Flags belonging to this type indicate process anomalies (followed by Teams during Agile execution) e.g. missing effort estimations in Jira stories, Effort overruns, Aging issues in Jira, etc. Resolution of these flags lead to improving the execution workflow.
Quality: Flags belonging to this type indicate potential quality mishaps e.g. missing effort quality of design files, untracked customer feedback, deviations from ui design system, etc. Resolution of these flags lead to standard adherence and better outcomes.
Technology: Flags belonging to this type indicate impending technology bottlenecks during execution e.g. pending PR review, pending deployments/release, code smells, etc. Resolution of these flags lead to optimization of technology execution.
Documentation: Flags belonging to this type indicate documentations anomalies that exists in the system during execution e.g. missing requirements, insufficient requirements for a build issue, planning of tasks, scope changes in requirements etc. Resolution of these flags act as an aid to keep the team members on the same page.
Category of Flags:
Whilst, Type of Flags outline the type of debts one could accumulate, the Category of Flag indicate the impact zone.
Feedback: Flags belonging to this category map to feedback coming from stakeholders (external stakeholders e.g. customers, internal stakeholders e.g. product managers, engineering leads).
Requirements: Flags belonging to this category map to requirement challenges either due to missing requirements or insufficient requirements/plan or changing requirements.
Code: Flags belonging to this category map to multi-dimensional impact on the code ranging from pending reviews or code smells or predictions associated with risk of bugs, code maintainability risks, etc.
Deployment & Release: Flags belonging to this category map to multi-dimensional impact on deploy (and therefore release) of code ranging from pending deployments or bugs since first deployment of PR in various landscapes or predictions associated with deployment risks, etc.
Effort: Flags belonging to this category map to effort of job done by team members ranging from missing effort estimates to extension of efforts/sprints leading to overloaded members in a sprint.
Conclusion:
Flags are an able partner for the Scrum teams to get a comprehensive view what's going wrong and what might go wrong during execution, shown in multiple dimensions. Flags can used by Scrum teams as a tool to make their rituals productive (Daily stand-ups, retrospectives, scrum of scrum, etc.)