Software development teams are much larger than the engineers that write code. Writing and deploying code are often only the tip of the iceberg.

A well oiled software team will often consist of: All of these people need to know something about what the software development lifecycle is producing and shipping, but the level of information can vary dramatically based on a team member's position.

Sleuth was built to automatically generate information to satisfy each team member's needs. Check out these features that make this possible.

Project dashboard

The project dashboard is great for getting a quick sense of what’s been delivered in a period of time. This is where a development manager can get a real sense of how their team is running. How often are you shipping code? Who’s getting work out? What exactly are you shipping? How many deploys did it take to get a stable code change out? Are you putting out large changes or are they small, incremental changes? The dashboard allows you to see answers to all these questions quickly and easily.

Email reports

Sleuth can generate and send email reports for every deploy, all deploys in a day, in a week, in two weeks or four weeks. For support engineers it’s important to know when customer facing issues are resolved. Subscribing to every deploy allows these team members to be immediately informed when a change is rolled out. Product managers are often concerned with the wholistic view of a project. A weekly rollup of everything deployed is a great way for them to stay abreast. Marketing, sales and execs need to stay on top of the zoomed-out big picture, and bi-weekly or monthly updates provide them with exactly what they’re looking for.

ChatOps release notes

Sleuth can be configured to post a deploy summary into your ChatOps channels via Slack or HipChat. This lets your development engineers know when their code has shipped and alerts your DevOps engineers to be on the lookout for any site reliability issues related to the change. It’s also a wonderful way to inform your wider organization about changes being made to your production environments.

Powerful search

Being able to narrow down deploys by date is what the project dashboard is all about. For developers trying to track down a new bug, it’s important to find the code that created it. However, sometimes you remember the pull request title, or maybe the commit message for the change you need to track down. This is when search comes to the rescue. All pull request summaries, commit messages, issues titles, filenames changed and authors are indexed so it’s simple to quickly find the deploy you’re looking for. Want to know when you rolled out the Django 1.9 upgrade? Just head over the search page and find out.

Provide everyone on your team with the right information

One of the hardest things about shipping software is communication. Providing different team members with the right information isn’t always easy. If you’re tracking your work using GitHub or Bitbucket then let Sleuth do the heavily lifting of putting that information into your software team's hands.