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Haystack Notifications
Introducing Haystack Notifications
Introducing Haystack Notifications

Prevent Technical Debt before it happens by alerting on risk factors and progress in software teams

Julian Colina avatar
Written by Julian Colina
Updated over a week ago

The Haystack Dashboard allows you to keep track of essential metrics to identify and remove bottlenecks with data-driven insights. This is however only part of how Haystack helps drive engineering performance.

Risk factors like Pull Requests being merged without review, making overly large amounts of changes or being stuck in back-and-forth discussions can indicate where tech debt is being created. Developers can also be blocked for a variety of reasons such as waiting for their PRs to be reviewed, too much concurrent work or overly large development tasks.

From flagging abnormal amounts of weekend activity to alerting on approved PRs still awaiting merge; Haystack provides customisable notifications that allow you to identify when developers get stuck, when risks emerge and monitor sprint progress.

What's more, Haystack allows you to configure these notifications to go be sent over both email and to your team's Slack chat - allowing teams to self-resolve most risks as they appear.

Be sure to set-up notifications in Haystack to proactively unblock your team and receive further peace of mind.

What are notifications?

Notifications are a great way to keep a pulse on how your team is doing.

Haystack notifications help keep a watchful eye on:

  1. Stuck Developers

  2. Potential Problems (burnout, high WIP, etc)

  3. Sprint Progress

What types of notifications do you support?

There are two types of notifications supported:

  1. Daily Health Check (Daily Recap & Potential Risks)

  2. Weekly Recap (Weekly Snapshot, Change Lead Time Trends & Throughput Trends)

How can I receive notifications?

Haystack supports sending notifications via:

  1. Email

  2. Slack (for further help, see Troubleshooting Slack Notifications)

Why do I need them?

From stale pull requests to unbalanced workloads, it's tough to keep a pulse on the many things that can get stuck in our processes. Notifications are a way to highlight these events and spur additional conversations on your team.

You'll be surprised how many things slip through the cracks unnoticed. Notifications help you proactively support your team when they need you most.

Now that you know what alerts generally are and how to use them, let's dive a bit deeper.

Next Steps

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