Jellyfish is one of the most popular engineering management platforms, offering comprehensive insights into engineering organizations, their tasks, and operational processes. Engineering management platforms aggregate and analyze metrics from various tools and systems that enable the software delivery process and development lifecycle. Jellyfish and other engineering management platforms aim to connect key development processes and decisions to overarching business goals.

Notifications are designed to be annoying. Think of your phone buzzing in a quiet room: it demands your attention, lighting up your screen and making noise so you look at it. A notification is supposed to pull you away from whatever you’re working on. They can be useful, but they can also be a nuisance.

Microservices architecture is a method of developing software systems that structures an application as a collection of loosely coupled services, each focusing on a single function or business capability. Each service operates within a discrete, confined context, communicating with other services through well-defined interfaces — typically APIs.

In cultures of continuous improvement, the criteria by which teams define a release's fitness for production is flexible by definition. Engineering organizations strive to balance risk and velocity, aiming for high quality releases on a cadence that doesn’t impede overall business throughput.

Commercial Internal Developer Portals (IDPs) are a valuable investment for teams that want to move quickly toward addressing initiatives surrounding software ownership, production readiness, and improving developer experience. But there's a common misconception that all commercial internal developer portals (IDPs) carry an inherent risk of “vendor lock-in” vs open-source alternatives like Backstage.

Metrics provide visibility into engineering operations, allowing teams to iteratively improve. By tracking key data points like deployment frequency, lead time, server uptime, and change fail rate over time, organizations can spot trends, compare against benchmarks, and address process inefficiencies.

Internal Developer Portals and platforms do a lot—they're an all-in-one system of record, lever for defining and driving best practice, and vehicle for creating new software components. It's not hard to understand why undertaking such a project can be labor and resource intensive. But it doesn't necessarily have to be.

There is nothing more valuable to an organization than data—about customers, products, opportunities, gaps... the list goes on. We know that to maximize value streams for the business we need to turn a critical eye to data related to how each group operates, including software development teams. In 2019 a group known as the DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) team set out to find a universally applicable framework for doing just that.

Backstage by Spotify is an open-source platform for building IDPs (internal developer portals). IDPs provide standardization and visibility for engineering teams and managers, as the single source of truth for status, ownership, and metrics on software projects. Teams often try Backstage when they have aspirations of “building anything and everything,” but run into problems when supporting “anything and everything” becomes a full-time job for multiple front and back-end engineers.

In modern engineering teams, lack of comprehensive data visibility can be a major problem. Without full insights into workflows, projects, and processes, issues can arise that create bottlenecks, increase costs, and hamper team productivity. Organizations have long measured company and business metrics, but now leaders want to understand how the engineering teams work from a data- and metrics-oriented approach.