Like a scene out of an apocalyptic movie, the coronavirus devoured the world, laying smoldering waste to the old patterns and paradigms in almost all aspects of our lives.
In the course of upending the entrenched status quo, the ravaging pandemic placed technology on a pedestal while dethroning human touch.
Amid the quiet of the lockdowns, the loud drumbeat of the fast-paced unfolding technological revolution is drowning out the voices of those yearning for the protection of what makes us human—the pursuit of connection.
This whole situation has left businesses with the formidable task of walking a fine line between technology and human interaction in order to build customer trust in digital tools and experiences while making them feel less wretched at the prospect of months with limited human contact.
Waydev, a Git analytics platform for engineering productivity, is one of the companies that is making an endeavor to ensure users are not lost in the tangle of technical-sounding terms and still feel human while making the best of what technology has to offer.
Their solution enables managers to measure the performance of their software engineers automatically without their manual input.
“In a nutshell, it’s like Google Analytics, but for software development,” Alex Circei, CEO and co-founder at Waydev, told 150sec in an interview.
Industry data shows that there are around 20 million developers in the world who have the ability to collectively raise global GDP by $3 trillion in less than 10 years.
However, this opportunity is being wasted as businesses across all industries lose nearly $300 billion of developer productivity every year.
That is why San Francisco-based Waydev is pursuing a mission to help enterprises thrive by reducing developer inefficiency.
“All my life I struggled to understand the output of engineers, and this was a big problem for me. We wanted to address this issue, and it took us about two years to launch a very good product.” said Circei, a Romanian-born entrepreneur whose earlier ventures include Copimaj, a digital e-commerce agency, and Billme, an invoicing app.
He believes that most managers are making “inaccurate” decisions based on “intuition” as they do not have access to enough useful data.
Founded in 2017, Waydev introduces itself as “the new agile data-driven method of tracking engineers’ output directly for your Git repos without their manual input”.
It analyzes the client’s codebase from GitHub, GitLab, Azure DevOps, and Bitbucket to help them become data-driven and make objective decisions that contribute to faster delivery of reliable software while driving up engineering productivity.
Git is the backbone of the product developed by Waydev, which Circei admits may sound too technical to those outside the industry. It is defined as an open-source distributed version control system designed for tracking changes in source code during software development.
In the words of Waydev’s CEO, Git analytics is the present and future of engineering and will keep reinventing how managers assess the work done by their team.
However, he argues all this jargon and the automatic process does not mean that engineers are treated like robots or one-to-one communication would take a complete back seat.
“Engineers are in our hearts,” he said, adding that Waydev brings a lot of value to their work as it eliminates the need for them to attend the “much-hated” unnecessary meetings and allows them to concentrate on what they love to do, which is coding.
“Many managers keep asking engineers the same questions every day, which is not very pleasant for developers. Our solution helps both parties focus the communication on what really matters,” Circei explained.
He added that such a mechanism also saves employees from awkward, embarrassing moments. “Sometimes a manager may unintentionally make an engineer feel bad for a mistake in front of others. We are humans and don’t like such types of communication. That’s why we’re promoting a better, more efficient way of communicating through a live chat system.”
Asked what makes Waydev stand out in the market, Circei said it is very user-friendly and its flexible architecture allows for the integration of the Git platforms that the client is already using.
“We are one of the pioneers and the only self-service tool in the market. We also have the most complete product, and users start getting value from it right away,” he noted, adding that they are introducing new features to offer customers an even better experience.
According to its CEO, Waydev—which has partnered with GitHub, GitLab, Microsoft, and Atlassian—has received “positive” feedback from engineering leaders and is working with both “small and Fortune 100 companies.”
It has been trusted by over 300 companies across the globe, including Cubyn, Accordo, Jolt, Zesty.ai, DeskJob, Nowcom, Retreat Guru, Musafir.com, Instaleap, and Wiggot.
Elaborating further on Git analytics, Circei said, to the best of his knowledge, more than 95 percent of software engineers are working with this methodology through service providers such as GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, and Azure DevOps.
“We were able to connect these platforms and find a way to store all the codes and activities in one place so that managers can easily pull the data they need after application of the metrics defined. We actually help executives better understand what is there by doing this analysis.”
As for the prospects of this market, he noted that it will be “the new way of looking at the output of engineers”.
In his view, this is just the beginning of an “exciting” path ahead and a day will come when the efficiency of all engineers in the world will be measured with Git analytics tools similar to what Waydev, as a precedent-setter, has developed.
On how the coronavirus pandemic affected their business and the demand for their solution, Circei said his company saw a drop in revenue growth in May and June but is in a “good spot” now.
According to his observation, more and more enterprises are realizing the importance and benefits of productivity-boosting tools, especially now that remote work has accelerated.
Recent surveys indicate that about half of software developers are working more hours than before COVID-induced quarantine and that they are overall “very concerned” about their physical and mental health.
The future of remote engineering will be marked by fewer, but more productive hours spent working, Circei said, adding that Waydev, as its name suggests, will continue to show the way to software development visionaries.
Disclosure: This article mentions a client of an Espacio portfolio company.
