Building and shipping new features is hard work, and having something that blocks you during that process can be agonizing. Having a healthy workflow that doesn’t limit you is crucial when progressing your code from development to production.
Semaphore is all about smoothening the gap between pushing changes to version control and seeing those changes in production. Sometimes, that gap can be widened by the time developers are waiting for builds and deploys to start. We built Speed Insights for organizations to address this.
Why waiting time matters
On Semaphore, teams with 10 or more members spend more than 8 hours per week on average waiting for their builds to start, although Semaphore is the fastest hosted CI service.
Waiting for a build to start can be mentally draining in some cases. One of those cases is when you’ve just merged an important pull request to the master branch. You’re expecting your build to finish in a given time frame, but you didn’t consider the possible waiting time. This can have a significant impact on productivity and motivation, thus breaking developers flow.
How Speed Insights help monitor waiting time
We here at Semaphore noticed such a pattern of developers and projects waiting for build capacity. We first released Speed Insights for projects, a place where you can measure and improve the build time of your project. Today, we’re happy to release Speed Insights for organizations – a place where you can monitor how much waiting time is accumulated on each project.
On the Speed Insights page, you can view your organization’s waiting time over the previous week. This page is updated at the start of each week, so you can get the latest information on how much your team spends waiting.
In order to have better control, you can see waiting time by project:
You can also view how much each developer is waiting:
If your organization’s waiting time during the previous week has been under 1 hour, it is too small to affect you, and you will get a message that you’re doing great.
We’re hoping that Speed Insights will bring a better understanding of the amount of time you’re waiting.
Happy building!
At Semaphore, we’re on a mission to make continuous integration fast and easy. If you’re new to Semaphore, learn more about our hosted continuous integration and delivery service.