Increase developer productivity
What if you could remove delays from your code review process and have developers ship code faster? Or save developers hours per week by automating tasks? How much work could your devs get done if they spent less time switching between different tools and tasks?
These are common challenges software teams face in their day-to-day work. Over the past 4 months, we’ve interviewed hundreds of engineers and engineering managers to identify constraints and bottlenecks in their daily software development cycles. Continuous context switching, waiting time and notification overflow stood out as common blockers across the teams hindering the individuals from performing at their best.
While every company and team is different, most of them have one thing in common: they all want to build the best possible product in the fastest possible time. Inevitably, this puts a lot of pressure on the engineers and engineering teams to be productive. And it should be in every tech company's interest to invest in the culture, tools, and processes needed to help them achieve this. Here’s where we can help.
At Buzz, we make developers more productive by reducing the cognitive load they must process from notification overflow and constant context switching. Today's developers are dealing with a ton of different work tools, constantly reacting to notifications, and manually updating their colleagues around pull requests (PRs) etc. This is oftentimes doing more harm than good to a developer’s day. Designed to cut through the noise, Buzz enables developers to focus on what matters - crafting high-quality code and delivering value to your customers.
Starting your day off right
Buzz’s menu bar app allows quick access to the relevant information you (the developer) need to do your best work. As you start your day, open the app and see a list of your upcoming meetings and a summary of your pull requests (PRs). This combined Calendar and Github overview let you quickly see what your day looks like and what work you need to focus on, with only one click.
If you have any PRs waiting for your review or requiring your attention, they’ll be clearly marked in the list. You can easily click through to view them on Github, or set aside time to review them later, based on your availability that day.
Whenever there’s an update on the PRs or when a new meeting is coming up, Buzz will notify you throughout the day.
But Buzz isn’t just for your own PRs - it also gives you an overview of all the PRs in your team.
Unblocking your team
It's generally a good idea to minimize work in progress by prioritizing pull requests and code reviews over starting new tasks. But a common problem in fast-moving teams is that pull requests are easily forgotten and slip through the cracks. Interestingly enough, we found from our interviews, that 8/10 developers were experiencing this issue due to the same reason; It is hard to get a clear overview of the entire team’s PRs without digging into email notifications or browsing long threads in slack.
That’s why we added the option to view a list of all your teams PRs and customize it to suit your needs and your team’s way of working. This view is great to see if there are any idle PRs that you can help out with or any new PRs that might need your review before you get wired in on new tasks.
By going through your PRs and your team’s PRs, you’ll be up to date on all the work that needs to be done and any blockers that might be holding things up. When it’s time for your standup meeting, you can use it to discuss potential issues instead of just updating each other on your work in progress.
After a year of heavy lay-offs in the tech sector, it has never been more relevant for tech companies to invest in developer experience and empower the people they have to do so much more.
If you too want to take Buzz for a spin, you can download it here.
(Buzz is available for MacOS. Windows will be released in a few weeks and you can sign up here to get notified)
If you take it for a spin, please let us know what you think on Twitter or connect with us on LinkedIn. We’d like to keep the community tight, even as it grows.
In this blog series you can expect curated summaries on the latest research on developer productivity and experience, combined with interviews and real-life experiences from our customers, developers and industry experts.