Swarmia Pros and Cons

We were looking for a way for our development team to receive notifications about Github pull requests in Slack. Swarmia does this and much more.

I like the insights into the time the development team spends on different types of issues, such as bug fixing, new development, and productivity. I also enjoyed the insights into the turnaround time for our pull requests and tasks.

We use this daily, and it is super easy to set up. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

To fully benefit from all the features, you need to ensure that all users set up all the individual integrations with Slack, GitHub, etc. To be honest, this is actually not very difficult, so not much of a dislike. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Swarmia makes it simple to gather engineering metrics in one plac; this gives great visibility to the engineering team and helps them understand and analyse their performance, allowing them to define ways to improve. Without Swarmia, achieving the same would require a lot of manual effort and spreadsheets. Additionally, it provides a nice UX and UI and great integrations. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

At the moment, it only supports a few integrations, mainly Jira and Github. This means that certain metrics are not following industry standards, for example DORA. Adding integrations with CI/CD tools, e.g. CircleCI, and Incident Management tools, e.g. PagerDuty, Incident.io, OpsGenie, would create a much better and more complete picture. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

De las cosas que mas me gustan aparte de su facilidad de uso, es la capacidad de integración con otras herramientas. A veces olvido revisar cómo van las cosas en mi equipo, Slack me lanza una notificación con un resumen detallado. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Tal vez esto puede que esté relacionado con mi gestión como lider y no con Swarmia directamente, y es que al decirle al equipo que usaríamos Swarmia, esto generó un estrés en los desarrolladores porque pensaron que ahora serian medidos linea por linea de código. Pero luego de muchas reuniones, llegamos a un punto en el que entendimos el uso de Swarmia como una herramienta para ser mas eficientes y enfocar los esfuerzos de la manera mas adecuada, incluso ver aspectos de nuestro flujo de trabajo que son invicibles. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The navigation experience is wonderful. It can be easily integrated with Slack and GitHub. The notifications emitted by Swarmia are pretty cool as well, specially those that let you know that a peer requested a review from you(The digest is also great).

I mainly used as a companion for my retrospectives and it felt great to seek opportunities for improvement as a team while observing those metrics.

Overall, Swarmia is handy, easy to implement and an accurate source of team metrics. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Well, there were two things that threw me off a tiny bit. The customer support is okay, but kind of delayed(perhaps due to the plan I was on, which I guess makes sense).

The other one has to do with commit squashing. It's not a feature that they support and by the time I realized we had already started running a Squashing strategy for our pull requests, which ended up harming the cycle time calculation(more exactly the WIP portion). Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Working Agreements feature is great. It sends out a daily digest giving us insights into how disciplined we are as an engineering team and it's very helpful during dev retros. Also their PR tracking combined with DORA metrics is well built. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I can't think of anything. It's been great. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I learned a loooot from the insights tab, and it's the most useful, in my opinion.

I can't decide now which one I use the most, if it's the insights tab or the investments balance. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

For a small startup that relies in investments, it might be a little expensive if you invite too many people, but that 14 people range helps a lot, so thanks for that. Hope we can pay once we grow more :) Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The design and user interface is world-class. The integration with Jira and GitHub is really powerful. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I can't tell if it's possible to create custom dashboards unique to a team that show metrics/graphs from various categories. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

- Easy to set up

- Decent metrics product

- Excellent pull request notifications / slack intergration Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

- Pricing is out to lunch (same price as github enterprise for their lite plan) Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Ability to see how your team is doing overall and where the efforts are going. specially like the feature about Investment balance that categorizes the work based on whether its a new work, enhancement, keeping the lights on etc. and Also what was planned and what was not planned. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Investment balance can be improved a lot using AI to do finer categorisation. Lot of activities still go as uncategorized. also PLanned and unplanned work can be improved by looking at current sprints etc. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Swarmia setup with straightforward as it integates with our tools out of the box. I liked the support of DORA Metrics and the different options avaibale to feed the deployment and incident data to Swarmia. Other features I like are Investment Balance and Work Agreements Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Few things can be improved but nothing major I can think of now Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.