What Happens When a Software Development Team Adopts Zenhub?

Our users tell us all the time that Zenhub has a positive effect on their ability to ship better software, faster. We’ve got a great group of customers that go out of their way to let us know they appreciate the efficiencies our platform brings to their teams.

While it’s always great to hear users sing your praises, we still had a few questions about just how much of an effect we were having on their day-to-day process:

• Are software teams more productive when using Zenhub?
• Does Zenhub drive alignment across the business resulting in software teams shipping on schedule more often?
• How much does adopting Zenhub for Agile Project Management increase productivity?

Project Management is a huge part of software development. On a software team, the Engineering and Project Management teams spend hundreds of hours per year on project management tasks alone. These tasks include planning, organizing and prioritizing issues, assigning tasks, and managing to-do lists. It’s an important but time-consuming task to keep project progress on track. The best way to better understand this large portion of software development overhead was to ask a few questions and look at the data.

Our Approach

We surveyed over 500 software engineers, developers, and project managers, and our data shows that when the team is focused on the code rather than project status updates, more work gets done.

We’ve grouped the data we gathered into four sections. Read through and discover what this select group of software teams does differently, what correlates with “strong results,” and what the shift to project management inside GitHub can do for your team:

#1: Being more productive and focused on the code

Project status meetings usually take much longer than they need to, they can also become so frequent that they end up taking up a large chunk of people’s time. Powered by live GitHub data, Zenhub helps to reduce the number of meetings needed to provide project progress updates.

Our survey results show that when project progress updates are tracked in real-time with Zenhub 52% of our respondents had fewer meetings. Productivity increases when the dev team spends more time coding and less time providing project updates on third party tools, reducing unnecessary context switching and preventing developers from losing focus.

78% of our respondents felt they understood priorities better with ZenHub.

#2: With Zenhub, keeping projects in scope and shipped on-time is easier

Built into GitHub and relying on its underlying real-time data, Zenhub makes project management easier. Our survey found that our respondents feel more confident that project progress is always up-to-date and accurate when working inside GitHub with Zenhub. With a platform like Zenhub project managers can better understand team velocity and capacity, estimate project completion dates, and identify at-risk projects. Our survey results also say that Zenhub helped our respondents to better find and remove bottlenecks in their development workflow.

ZenHub helps teams understand how shifts in team velocity might impact future planning.

#3. Zenhub users get more from GitHub

With Zenhub, GitHub becomes a powerful Agile project management platform. Zenhub not only increases GitHub usage but it has also reduced the number of tools needed and the time spent on project management tasks. Our results show that over half of our respondents, 54.1%, spend less than one hour per day on project management tasks when working inside GitHub with Zenhub.

Question: How much time do you now spend per day on project management tasks working inside GitHub with Zenhub? This includes planning, issue organization, and prioritization, etc.

Our respondents also saw significant increases in the utilization of their investment in GitHub as illustrated by heightened usage across several features including Milestones (+72%), Labels (+19%), Issues (+5%), and GitHub Actions (+20%).

Question: Which GitHub features did you use regularly BEFORE/AFTER Zenhub?

#4: More accurate project status with fewer tools

Teams that started to use Zenhub have seen a reduction in project management tools needed. 89% of our respondents were able to eliminate one or more tools from their workflow by using Zenhub. 12% of teams had reduced their tools by three or more. This leads to more accurate project status at any given time, as it requires less effort to track project progress

Zenhub runs on GitHub live data, so project progress is accurately recorded at any given time.

Question: How likely is it that your project progress was accurately recorded at any given time BEFORE and AFTER Zenhub?

With ZenHub, each user benefits from the added transparency our platform provides, helping them create and ship high-quality software. Serving as a central hub for the entire team, Zenhub brings teams closer together and closer to the code.