Haystack Reviews

Haystack was absolutely a lifesaver for us to get insight with more fidelity and more fine-grain awareness. Having all the Metrics in one place at the company to show to the Board and Executive team in a really quantitative and data-driven way was extremely valuable and valuable.

Some performance lag and functional bugs at times, though many of these have been addressed.

Quality, velocity, and predicatbility have improved exponentationally with a shift from waterfall to continuous delivery, largely supported and funded with the insight and credibility metrics from Haystack provide.

Provides engineering North Star metrics from the top-down, allowing you to find where bottlenecks are in the software development lifecycle. Risk alerts provide very easy to understand, fast insights.

The company behind it is a fast-growing start-up, so some things are in the future roadmap and other things are still being scaled.

If you're unsure, go through the free trial and see how it goes.

I used Haystack when I worked leading an internal developer platform team at a later-stage start-up - it allowed me to know which areas I need to focus on to improve, and gave me empirical proof to show that I had moved those metrics.

- Simple integration

- Performance metrics are based on team performance, not individuals

- DORA metrics

Overall, when it's necessary to measure the team performance and improve shipping speed, Haystack provides valuable insights.

The web interface works slow sometimes. I would be happy to use a more modern interface.

We're improving Software Engineering quality, performance, and culture of shipping fast.

- simple configuration of the tool

- close integration of DORA metrics

- very precise onboarding, explanation of all details of the tool

- excellent support over the Slack channel

- Self-explanatory graphs with a drill-down to detailed data

While we are in transition to continuous delivery, we need to separate measurements between stages. At this moment, there are just global filters for pull requests which do not allow applying a specific filter for the exact DORA metric.

At Smartsupp, we've used Haystack for about 3 months.

Smartsupp is a SaaS company where agile culture and DevOps mindset go together naturally. What we really needed, is to measure our performance. Prior to using Haystack, we felt that our Cycle Time is on the increase, with it taking longer and longer for engineers to ship software. Since we've started using Haystack, our Cycle Time has so far decreased by an average of 27%.

Measurement in Haystack allows us to drill-in on the things that matter most to improving our software development pipelines on a daily basis. We're seeing work being developed quicker, whilst we've seen our First Response Time on Pull Requests drop.

Thanks to real-time alerts via Slack on risk factors, teams can resolve most issues themselves. Haystack has helped take work off my plate and I'd recommend it to others in a Head of Engineering role, who wants to strengthen the responsibility and performance of development teams.

We missed a measurement of our performace to get feedback on our work/performace.

Quantifying our team's software delivery performance is made a lot easier with Haystack's focused dashboards, which is helpful in any analysis of our engineering processes. I'm also able to easily view at a glance WIP/long-lived PRs across repos that may be an indicator of chokepoints in the process.

Julian has also been very receptive to feedback, and I believe the team is on the right track in tackling some of the issues with git-based analytics.

Some key integrations with communication tools (e.g. Slack) would be very useful in elevating the visibility of the metrics & insights from this solution.

Try it out! It's pretty lightweight to start off with and costs nothing (at the time of my review) to trial this solution out.

Haystack has helped me measure key parts of my team's software delivery performance over time (cycle time, throughput). This has been useful in communicating our engineering capabilities to management, as well as in debugging the software development processes for various teams.

Historical performance. Being able to see how the metrics have changed over time, whether it's over 6 months or the last sprint. Getting performance summaries in my inbox that I can easily bring to 1-on-1s and team check-ins.

There are still a few options that I would love to see implemented into the product to make it better. That being said, the team is incredibly responsive and receptive to feedback. I have watched the product get better as I have used it.

I highly recommend giving Haystack a try, even just for their free trial. In my experience this simple product provides engineering leaders with a ton of value to be better leaders and make their orgs better.

As an engineering leader, I now have a clear idea how my team is getting better and faster relative to historical performance, and where we need to make improvements, backed by data instead of hunches. The metrics available in Haystack are spot on, anything more is unnecessary, overwhelming, or noisy. Surprisingly affordable as well compared to competitors like GitPrime.

Understand if there's too much work in progress or if a team or individual is at risk of burnout

Some of the stats are not very actionable and it's not clear how to use them to help empower the team

It's a "pulse check" on an engineering organization and can help inform 1-on-1 conversations

While scaling, we had no idea of how our team was working while the communication complexity was growing exponentially. Haystack gives us alerts every day on potential problems. We iterate our processes after seeing issues that we had no idea about. They also provide a simple dashboard to see the effect of each change. After Haystack, our Cycle Time decreased by 70%.

It'd be great if they also gave notifications on Slack.

Just enter their trial, its very easy with a few clicks on github. It'll give you insights on your software team that you haven't considered before and show its value right on the first week.

It gives us an overview of how our teams are doing. We've decreased cycle time, increased merge ratios, and increased our throughput.

When we wanted to track the velocity of our team then wanted to stay close to the source of truth. With Github integration we can track our performance in delivering value.

Its an start up with more features coming soon in the future.

Having insights how we performing and where we can improve on a team level.

Lots to love here. The Process Report helped us identify bottlenecks before they even happened through unhealthy patterns. Activity heatmap helps me see how meetings and deployment schedules affected my team’s productivity in real time.

They don't plug into JIRA (yet) which is something we could use but the team actually built a custom quarterly report for me to tie in our JIRA workflows which was really helpful.

We’re making a ton of process changes in our team on a regular basis. We wanted to know how these changes were impacting the team. Haystack has been really great for this and helping us be lean and effective