Elite DevOps Teams Recognized in 2022 Haystack Pioneers Awards

(MENAFN- News Direct)

San Francisco, US | January 24, 2022 11:09 AM Eastern Standard Time

 Engineering Productivity company Haystack has today announced the winners of its 2022 Haystack Pioneers awards. The winning companies were found to implement data-driven DevOps Continuous Improvement techniques throughout their engineering organisations and were then able to use these techniques to empirically improve software development Cycle Time .

All companies using the Haystack platform were automatically nominated for these awards, and the winners were selected using a systematic review that considered empirical data to measure each organisations performance. The selection process was blind to the customer's spending on Haystack, and no inducements were offered or received to impact those selected as winners.

Two of the four winning company's have already secured unicorn status, with valuations over $1bn+. All the winners operate in different markets; FinTech, HealthTech, EdTech and Digital Supply Chain. However, interestingly, all the winners are headquartered in European countries (two in the UK, and one each in the Netherlands and Germany), despite companies around the world being considered for the awards.

Haystack's co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, Kan Yilmaz , said:“Despite so many exceptional teams using Haystack and achieving remarkable DevOps transformations, we identified four engineering organisations who have been exceptionally successful at adopting a data-driven approach to Continuous Improvement. Our research has shown this performance requires outstanding technical leadership and psychological safety.”

Yilmaz concluded:“Congratulations to the teams at Bought By Many, Luscii, Forto and Unibuddy. We are pleased to continue to work with such a tenacious group of engineering leaders who are continually investing in Engineering Productivity.”

FinTech company, Bought By Many, has been improving insurance since 2012. Their insurance cover has received multiple awards and they were voted the Best Pet Insurance Provider in the 2020 Insurance Choice Awards.

Technology is at the core of Bought By Many's offering, having been the first UK pet insurer to offer online form-free claims and boasting a focus on user experience. In 2018, Wired magazine listed Bought By Many as one of Europe's hottest start-ups and they ranked 30th on the Sunday Times Tech Track 100 for 2020. In June 2021, the company announced it had secured $350m in Series D funding, giving a pre-money valuation of over $2bn and thereby becoming a unicorn.

Bought By Many's efforts on ever-better engineering productivity is led by Timothy Kimball, Russel Rhodes, Shaun Dobson, Andriy Rossoshynskyy, and these efforts achieved remarkable improvements over the second half of 2021. Engineering throughput has trended up by 37% as production deployments have seen an increase of 24%. Haystack Analytics data also shows the engineering team has seen a 30% decrease in Cycle TIme over 6 months, allowing them to complete and deploy new work even faster, resulting in delivery of business value to their customers even faster.

HealthTech start-up Luscii is on a mission to bring healthcare from the waiting room to the living room. Based in the Netherlands, the remote patient monitoring app is used in 7 countries, including 70% of the hospitals in the Netherlands, within England's National Health Service, and within Africa.

Over the second half of 2021, Luscii's engineering team increased production deployments by 89% and saw a 29% increase in engineering throughput. Over that time, Luscii has seen a 20% improvement trend in their Cycle Times.

Luscii's efforts to drive engineering productivity were led by Roy Pereira, Joris Janssen, and Boite Witte. Reflecting on their success, Pereira emphasizes Luscii's internal values: 'Be free and spark energy', 'Grow to last' and 'Show courage for integrity'.

Forto was founded with a vision of delivering a highly transparent, frictionless, and sustainable digital supply chain. Forto's platform technologies address the entire process stream, from offer, booking, document administration, tracking and tracing to proactive exemption processing and analysis, supporting customers with greater visibility, insight, and control. Leading manufacturers and e-commerce brands are among the 2,500 customers using Forto's digitally-focused offerings as part of their supply chain delivery. Headquartered in Berlin, Germany, the company currently has more than 700 employees with 15 locations across Europe and Asia including offices in Berlin, Hamburg, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Shanghai. In 2021, the company achieved unicorn status as it secured $240M in Series C funding at a valuation of $1.2B.

Masashi Beheim, the engineering team's Chief of Staff, has driven dev productivity improvements in Forto. During the second half of 2021, Forto's data trends saw an 81% increase in deployments and a 54% increase in engineering throughput whilst keeping Change Failure Rate stable within the healthy range. This all culminated in a 41% decrease in the Cycle Time of working on product features.

Beheim summarised his approach by saying:“We are doubling the size of our engineering org every year. Our main goal is to provide the team with a clear vision, effective structure, as well as great tools and processes. The team is motivated and has what it needs to be effective. That has been the key to our success.”

In 2021, the EdTech company Unibuddy raised an additional $20m for their student recruitment platform. The company helps boost university enrollment for 450+ universities globally.

Kimeshan Naidoo, Chief Technology Officer, has driven efforts to allow the company to measure Accelerate DevOps metrics and deploy services independently. These improvements have resulted in deployments increasing by 641% and throughput trending up by 28% over a 6 month period.

Accepting the award, Naidoo said:“We relentlessly focus on outcomes. Our engineering OKRs are all about driving a drastic improvement in the Accelerate metrics and a key focus for the past two quarters was increasing deployment frequency. This allowed our squads to invest in moving to independent deployment through developing their own services and to implement better development practices like trunk-based development, which helps increase deployment frequency.”

The importance of psychological safety is underscored in Unibuddy's success, Naidoo continued:“We invested heavily in psychological safety by first measuring it, and we're now holding workshops with all of our squads to improve it. Without psychological safety, squads won't take technical risks and try new things which are needed to drive the improvement of the Accelerate metrics!”

About Haystack

Analytics Haystack was founded in 2020 by Julian Colin and Kan Yilmaz for tech teams to learn more about roadblocks to their work, improve productivity and importantly identify burnout issues with developers. Haystack helps build elite developer teams by providing engineering metrics and alerts proven to drive performance, improve software reliability and prevent developer burnout.

Through their integration with GitHub, Haystack is able to provide live data insights that illustrate the entire delivery process from commit to deploy, being able to highlight bottlenecks like code review and team productivity. Using this feedback loop, Haystack users have increased production deployments by 58% and achieved 70% faster cycle times on average.

In June 2021, Haystack announced it had secured a US$1.2m funding round after graduating from Y Combinator's W21 batch.

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