Introducing Zenhub AI: The next frontier for Zenhub

At Zenhub, we’ve always believed developers do their best work when project management and other admin tasks aren’t bogging them down. This is what inspired us back in 2014 to build our initial MVP in the form of a GitHub plug-in, bringing project management closer to the code. 

As a company, we’ve always embraced the latest tech to drive our mission forward. Today, we’re exploring one technology in particular: Artificial Intelligence (AI) – we’re guessing some of you may have heard about it recently (probably a LOT). While it’s quickly reached “buzzword” status, it’s hard to ignore the potential of this tech – especially as it relates to developer productivity. 

Naturally, as a curious bunch, we’re exploring its potential to enhance Zenhub’s user experience and uncover more ways to make software teams’ lives easier. So far, we think it holds tremendous promise in reducing meetings, streamlining status updates, providing improvement recommendations, refining processes – you name it. All in line with the Zenhub mission. 

We wanted to invite you along on the journey with us as we explore some of the great potential this tech has for making project management better for everyone. Psst– if you can’t stick around to the end of the blog (or you’re just too darn excited), join our waitlist here: 

Zenhub.com/ai

Kicking the mission off with AI-suggested Labels

We’ve had our ear to the ground, chatting with software teams about their biggest project management pain points, and one that kept cropping up was “label sprawl” and its evil twin, “duplicate labels.” 

We’ve heard project managers say, “We have so many duplicate GitHub labels that the team doesn’t bother using them. Now I have to go back and manually label things to understand what type of work we delivered in the last sprint.” 

Our solution: AI-suggested labels. With how advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) has become recently, “label sprawl” seems like a perfect use case for this technology. Zenhub AI labels leverage OpenAI to improve your team’s data hygiene the moment you create a new issue. With AI labels, AI ensures your team categorizes issues accurately and consistently by suggesting the most appropriate label based on your issue data. 

Want to try it out? AI Labels are already available to try in beta! As with all the new AI experiences we’re building, we’re taking an opt-in-only approach to ensure your team understands how your data is being used.

AI for more accurate story point estimation

Considering the positive response we’ve gotten so far from AI labels, we’d like to explore other ways to improve the accuracy of your team’s data. Story point estimation has always been one of the most controversial aspects of agile because of questions regarding its accuracy, so this is an excellent next challenge for Zenhub AI.

Because AI learns from pattern recognition and story points are (ideally) calculated based on past estimations, we believe AI can greatly assist teams with accuracy. Or, at the very least, prevent teams from wildly underestimating their story points. 

We’re currently exploring using OpenAI to attribute story point estimations to new issues. This will eventually look like having an additional team member to estimate with and could greatly benefit new-to-agile teams or teams that still struggle with story points. 

Streamlining and simplifying standups

Zenhub has already cut time spent on agile events in half with Planning Poker and automated sprint planning, but why not tackle something that happens daily – the standup? 

We’ve been exploring the world of AI-generated daily standups, which will look like a daily summary of work in progress, blockers, and closed issues for you and your team members. We’re experimenting with leveraging tech like sentiment analysis to detect further and surface potential blockers in issues – possibly even before your team becomes aware of them. 

With this, the goal is to run through standups and identify blockers faster, make these meetings more productive, or even eliminate the standup entirely if your team prefers. It could also provide more historical standup data, so you no longer need to take meeting notes – they will be streamlined in one place, so you can always look back at what you missed. 

Enhanced learning: AI retrospectives & performance recommendations

At the heart of agile has always been a belief in constant improvement – both in the product and in the performance of the team working on it. Today, sprint retrospectives are a big part of this continuous improvement, and as we consider AI’s applications, sentiment analysis emerges as a potential solution for better retrospectives.

We know it’s not always easy to speak candidly about what didn’t go well in a sprint – and, sometimes, it’s all just a blur. Leveraging sentiment analysis has the potential to uncover some of the answers to “What went well” and “what went wrong,” giving teams a solid starting point for having more candid conversations and addressing issues that are easily overlooked.

Think: AI spotting areas for process enhancements or identifying how a team has improved since previous sprints. With access to historical sprint data, AI could help teams more closely examine their working styles and effectively address bottlenecks. 

We’re making Zenhub even smarter – and we’d love your help on the journey.

At Zenhub, our product has always contained intelligence (predicted project end dates or auto-generated sprints, anyone?) – AI offers ways to amplify this. As we navigate the current AI renaissance, our mission remains steadfast – to make developers’ lives easier. 

We’re not interested in building flashy AI features that are all sizzle and no steak. Instead, our focus is on leveraging this groundbreaking tech to alleviate your most pressing issues and enhance the overall user experience of our product.

With that in mind, we want to continue to evolve Zenhub with your input. Your thoughts and ideas are integral to our growth, and we encourage you to share them with us here.

As we look forward to a future infused with AI, we’re eager to share every development with you. Join the Zenhub AI waitlist here to stay updated on our progress. We’re just starting this journey, and we’re so excited for you to be a part of it. Together, let’s break the boundaries of intelligent project management.