What are the benefits of using crewlevel?

crewlevel as an Open Source Agile maturity tool enables software development teams to take a comprehensive view of their current state and track progress over time.

crewlevel helps teams identify areas of improvement, prioritize tasks, and measure progress. By using crewlevel, teams can better understand their strengths and weaknesses, enabling them to make more informed decisions and improve their overall performance.

Should I use an off-the-shelf tool like crewlevel for agile maturity assessment or build my own?

Assess whether crewlevel or any other the existing tool is customizable or if it meets all your requirements as is..

The main benefit of using crewlevel is that it provides a comprehensive view of the team's current state and progress. It helps teams identify areas for improvement, prioritize tasks, and measure progress. Additionally, crewlevel can be used to track changes in team dynamics over time, allowing teams to better understand their strengths and weaknesses. This enables them to make more informed decisions and improve their overall performance.

How can I use the output from crewlevel to drive action and progress?

An agile maturity tool like crewlevel can help provide useful insights into the current state of an organization's agility. This can then be used to inform decisions and establish priorities for improving agility. Teams can use the output from such a tool to focus their efforts on the areas that need most improvement and create action plans to increase their level of agility. These actions could include investing in training and education, changing structures or processes, or making organizational changes. Implementing these actions would result in measurable progress towards improving the team's agile maturity level over time. crewlevel can provide a board for identified tasks to be tracked and monitored, allowing teams to track their progress and measure the impact of their efforts. Those actions might be re-used by other teams within the same organization as part of their improvement efforts.

Are there any other open source or free agile maturity tools available?

Yes, there are a variety of open source and free agile maturity tools available. These tools are designed to help organizations assess, measure and improve their agile capability by providing guidance on best practices, techniques and frameworks for improving agility. The most popular open source or free agile maturity tool is the Agile Maturity Model (AMM), which provides a framework that can be used to evaluate an organization's maturity in agile. Additionally, there are many other tools available such as Scrumology's Open Source Hopper and the Agile Adoption Factors Evaluation Tool as well as crewlevel.

However, crewlevel provides a more holistic on the current state of agile maturity. It consolidates key performance indicators (KPIs) based on team performance as inputs for assessments, records survey outcomes and aids in establishing corrective measures - all under one roof. Integrated task boards help teams track their progress and measure their successes.

Why can't I use JIRA for measuring agile maturity?

Using Jira is definitely an option for much of what crewlevel has to offer. Jira is a great tool that helps teams effectively manage their day-to-day operations. However, for maximum accuracy in agile performance indicators, you'll need to install additional plugins and make customizations. Depending on the size of your organization, additional add-ins may not be installed due to licensing or performance constraints.

With crewlevel you can quickly start with all common indicators available based on imported data from Jira or any other tool. crewlevel also provides a comprehensive set of features to help teams track their progress and measure their successes. This includes task boards, which allow teams to easily view and manage tasks, as well as indicators that provide insights into team performance. Additionally, crewlevel offers survey capabilities that can be used to capture feedback from customers and other stakeholders. This data can then be used to identify areas for improvement and prioritize tasks.

Last but not least, crewlevel offers a variety of visualizations that can be used to quickly identify trends and patterns in data. These visualizations can be used to gain insights into team performance and help teams make informed decisions about their agile practices.

What is the target audience of crewlevel?

• Teams needing more support during the process of transitioning to using an agile approach.
• Leaders of organizations wanting to assess the effectiveness of their current agile practices.
• Teams wanting to measure and track their progress over time.
• Organizations looking for a comprehensive view of their current state and potential areas of improvement.
• Agile Coaches who want to use crewlevel to help their teams improve their performance.

Contribute to crewlevel

Why is crewlevel open source?

crewlevel is open source because it allows for a community of users to collaboratively create and modify tools, making them more dynamic and powerful. The open source approach encourages innovation, creativity and collaboration. Open source code can easily be shared and modified which makes crewlevel more available and attractive to potential users. Open source code also means that the software is free to use and modify, making it more accessible.

How can I contribute to crewlevel?

You can contribute to crewlevel by creating and managing communities. You can create discussions, present ideas, support other users with problems, and moderate any inappropriate content within the community. Additionally, you can work on developing new features or tools for the platform using coding knowledge or collaboration with development teams. Finally, you can help spread awareness about crewlevel by recommending it to your organization and customers.

Installation and Integration

Does crewlevel run in the cloud?

crewlevel runs as a docker container within your organization computing infrastructure. This might be a private, hybrid or pure public cloud. crewlevel fits best the needs of an organization when it can be closely integrated with Jira to pull the data in order to calculate the key performance indicators automatically.

How do I integrate any workflow tool with crewlevel?

crewlevel supports two types of import pipelines for data coming from your team workflow tool:

• CSV
• Jira Rest service (for server and cloud edition)

Regarding Jira integration make sure that Jira Rest interface is reachable from your installation location of crewlevel and a user has sufficient permission to read data from your Jira instance.

crewlevel gathers data from Jira at regular intervals, as set by a team administrator, or manually when needed. Moreover, Jira's pre-built functionality makes it possible to utilize web hooks to notify crewlevel once a sprint is finished. Then, crewlevel imports automatically data of the particular completed sprint.

If you need to use CSV pipeline (e.g. because Jira is not reachable or you use a different workflow tool) you should consider additional efforts for setup and extraction of your workflow tool. crewlevel requires information which might not be accessible through the UI of the workflow tool. Please contact us if you need further support regarding CSV import.

What happens with my imported data from Jira?

When crewlevel pulls data from Jira, it transfers issues, anonymized user info, and workflow details. No content data from title or summary fields will be imported. Users linked to an issue are anonymized upon import. crewlevel offers a static model for workflows and issues that cannot be customized. To properly work with several issue types and complex workflows that include multiple transitions, it's essential to first map your transitions with those from crewlevel. The following transitions are offered by crewlevel:

Transitions within crewlevel

Transition	Description
New	New item requested (to be refined, checked)
Backlog	Feature / Issue refined and is part of backlog
Ready to Start	Item selected for implementation (To Do)
In Progress	Item part of implementation
Done	Item resolved and done (per Definition of Done)
Declined	Item not needed anymore, rejected or waivered

The following issue types are offered by crewlevel:

Supported issue types of crewlevel

Issue	Description
Story	Issues such as Business User Stories, Features, Requirements
Bug	Production problems and defects
Task	Tasks to be done independent from development of business features
Enabler	Spikes, technical enhancements

If the transitions and entities model is not suitable for your requirements, you may consider creating your own reports to form the basis of your assessment and improvement process.

Once the data has been imported and approved by the team administrator crewlevel calculates relevant Key performance indicators (KPIs) for the affected team dependent on team type such as e.g. velocity, average lead and cycle times, resolves vs. spillover rates, Changed to done, estimation accuracy, etc.

What are the differences between the Jira Sprint burndown chart and the one in crewlevel?

crewlevel pulls a minimal dataset of issue data from Jira. Once the sprint is done, crewlevel will gather the data if the team is set to use an agile approach. If an issue is created prior to the start of a sprint but added in afterwards, then Sprint crewlevel won't be able to detect this modification. In Jira, the burndown chart would increase as a result of modifications, whereas in crewlevel the sprint scope would be adjusted. With crewlevel, changes are only registered during a sprint if an item is both created and added to the sprint after the start.