Delivery Performance Analytics

Advanced data analytics to sustainably ship better software-defined products faster

As software-defined product complexity increases, innovation becomes a key differentiator. The need to reduce time-to-market becomes more urgent, and cost control must be complemented by significant production process optimizations. To face this challenge, organizations must leverage automation, adaptable tooling, agile principles, improved hardware testing… and advanced data analytics — applied throughout the entire production system.

Over the past decade, the software industry has evolved from basic system telemetry to advanced platform monitoring. This shift has significantly improved service continuity at scale, while keeping costs under control. A similar transformation has started in the way we apply business intelligence to the production of software at scale, especially in those cases where that software is tightly coupled to hardware, where supply chains are complex and the product should be maintained for long periods of time.

The goal of such transformation is to sustainably increase delivery performance, enabling software-defined product companies to move faster, increase product quality, stay compliant and extend product lifespan, all at the same time, with no sacrifices.

Organizations aiming to improve their delivery performance as a prerequisite to improve organizational performance, must design, own, and continuously evolve a business intelligence strategy applied to the production of software, not just applied to the product itself, that supports:

  • Turning raw data from different sources into comprehensible information, and later into widely consumable insights about the production of their software..
  • Helping executives, managers, and engineering teams make data-supported and informed decisions about how software is produced.
  • Supporting continuous improvement across the entire product organization.

The service designed by Bitergia and myself accelerates the journey from monitoring to advanced analytics to business intelligence, helping software-defined product teams to:

  • Characterize their production environment through data, getting and end-to-end view of the software production environment
  • Identify complex delivery process constraints, distinguishing root causes from symptoms.
  • Define corrective actions and track their impact — locally, across the production system, and throughout the product portfolio lifecycle.
  • Gain valuable insights to continuously improve delivery performance in a sustainable way.

The service: Delivery Performance Analytics

Delivery Performance Analytics (DPA) equips corporations with the business intelligence to continuously improve sustainable delivery of better software-defined products faster, while increasing the workforce’s well-being.

Delivery Performance Analytics service one pager

The service offering is structured in four stages:

  1. DPA Solution:allows BItergia’s team to turn data into information by:
    • Making all the relevant data available and ready to process.
    • Processing all the relevant data so it can be consumed on a regular basis and on demand.
    • Enabling easy ways to consume the processed data directly through Bitergia Analytics Platform as well as the Client’s analytics platform
  2. DPA Consulting: Descriptive Analytics describes the Client’s production system, its environment, and involved stakeholders through data so:
    • The client’s production system, its environment and stakeholders interactions with those two are described by providing an end-to-end view that is comprehensible to the Client’s staff. Such end-to-end view is mostly provided through dashboards and reports, covering:
      • The entire Software Development Life Cycle of the target products 
      • The Client staff: from executives to dev. Teams
      • The organization: from business to engineering
    • The analysis of simple metrics raises questions about exposed patterns, trends, highlights, anomalies or any other relevant system behaviors that can be easily formulated now in a common language.
    • In consequence, DPA Consulting Team and the Client staff can perform more complex analyses later on (diagnostic analytics) based on the output (dashboards, graphs, tables, reports…) of this stage.
    • The Client acquires the necessary knowledge and capabilities to extend the  descriptive analysis  on its own to additional products or production systems.
  3. DPA Consulting: Diagnostic Analytics identifies areas of the production system and its environment that degrades the overall performance. The  DPA Consulting team in collaboration with the Client’s staff, provides the needed insights, mostly in the form of reports and workshops, to identify and characterise potential delivery and organizational performance gains, enabling the design of remedies or mitigation …
    • Using the descriptive analysis outputs and following business needs, identify and select the highest impact symptoms to investigate, performing diagnostic analysis.
    • Build a common understanding of the root causes of those symptoms and potential gains across the Client’s staff.
  4. DPA Consulting: Data-Supported Improvements combines the conclusions of both, the descriptive and diagnostic analysis, providing the necessary insights to:
    • Design remedies or mitigations to the identified root causes that explain the symptoms reflecting performance degradation
    •  Define a data-supported continuous improvement plan to apply, evaluate and adjust  those remedies or mitigations
    •  With Bitergia’s guidance at first, and their support later on, the Client will execute such data-supported continuous improvement processes, in a reduced number of teams initially. Later on, scale up such cont. improvement processes. 
    • Incorporate them in decision-making processes across the organization.
    • The Client acquires the necessary capabilities to design and execute additional data-supported continuous improvement processes on its own, to increase delivery and organizational performance.

The open source way: zero vendor lock-in

Delivery Performance Analytics is based on open source values:

  • The tool that collects the data from the different data sources, processes it, curates it, and presents the information in a consumable way, Bitergia Analytics Platform, is fully open source.
  • The customer will progressively take full control of the tool, the processed data, how to visualise it, the necessary steps to obtain insights as well as any other aspect of the service.
  • The consultancy team works transparently with our customers so that communication is fluid and we collaborate throughout this service.

We understand that our engagements with our customer base not only seek to increase their data analytics capabilities but also to promote the cultural change towards consistently making informed decisions at every level based on data. In simple terms, the Delivery Performance Analytics service comes with zero vendor lock-in.

Collaboration with Bitergia

Both Bitergia and Agustín Benito Bethencourt have worked together on several occasions before within different environments, building the trust and commitment required to push something like this forward.

Delivery Performance Analytics has been designed based on each other’s strengths. Agustín is the service architect and lead consultant, complementing a team of outstanding consultants, software and data engineers as well as data analysts from Bitergia.

“The combination of Bitergia’s advanced data analytics and consultancy capabilities and my experience in delivering software-defined products in complex environments, together with our shared open source and human-centric approach, brings a unique value proposition to companies that need to simultaneously reduce time to market, increase innovation rates and attract/retain talent.”.- Agustín Benito Bethencourt, Toscalix Consulting.

Bitergia has been the leading data analytics company for Open and Inner Source environments for +10 years. They are the main driving force behind GrimoireLab, the data analytics open source tool from the CHAOSS project, hosted at the Linux Foundation, which serves as the base for the Bitergia Analytics Platform. Bitergia is not just a founding member of that community project but also of InnerSource Commons, where its CEO, Daniel Izquierdo, was recently elected as President.

Bitergia has worked with many organizations that host essential open source projects, as well as many of their member companies. Delivery Performance Analytics is another step forward in Bitergia’s strategy to raise the data analytics bar in production environments, behind the firewall.

“At Bitergia, we strongly believe that complex supply chain environments will not be able to tackle the increasing levels of complexity within their products organizations without incorporating advanced data analytics capabilities as part of their everyday decision making processes.

Delivery Performance Analytics is a step forward in Bitergia’s strategy to bring our expertise into production environments, helping our customer to acquire and develop these advanced data analytics capabilities to improve how they create products at scale“.- Daniel Izquierdo, Bitergia’s CEO

Additional information about this service

You can find additional information about Delivery Performance Analytics service following these references