Overview
Each year, Appian Professional Services runs an internal hackathon, where on-the-ground consultants take a step back from client work to spend 24 hours working on a project. This year, the theme was ‘Establishing the Technical Standards for Our Customers and Partners’. We had some great submissions, including a code review plug-in, a database comparison tool, and a reusable interface generator. The winning project, Partner Performance Management, was a system to facilitate code review, aggregate and present code feedback, and track and report on developer performance. We’re super excited to share it with you!
Key Features & Functionality
Developers can submit code for review, or view completed code reviews that have been returned to them. When submitting code, they first select the sprint they are currently working on. The app then queries Jira for a list of stories in this sprint, and lets the user select the story they have been developing. Once they’ve selected a story, they go into the back end, and click-and-drag to select the objects they have modified as part of delivering this story. They then copy these objects from the back end, and paste them in to the rich text field. The system then parses the pasted data into a list of Appian Objects. The developer can remove any objects that aren’t relevant, add comments to the story, and submit for review.
When the reviewer initiates a review, they will see the list of objects modified. They can click on the object name to be taken to the object in the backend, and they can add a comment. They can provide feedback, separated into Stop Doing, Keep Doing, Start Doing. They can also add a Reviewer comment, and can rate the developer’s performance on this story using three metrics: percentage story completion, growth trajectory, and independence.
All users of the system have access to an All Feedback view, where they can view a list of feedback items previously entered by a reviewer. These can be searched by summary or description, or filtered by sprint, feedback type of tags. This enables quick filtering of information for use during sprint retrospectives, or when planning practice training sessions.
Project Managers in the system have access to a developer performance view, which lets them view metrics on the practice as a whole and on individual developers. This can be used to identify developers who are ready to take on more responsibility within the practice, as well as identify developers who would benefit from additional support and development.