Rollups for Tech Insights

In addition to the recent announcement of Decorators, and a much faster custom plugins pipeline, we’ve also shipped Rollups for Tech Insights users.

Tech Insights

Rollups

Rollups aggregate Scorecard and Check data by team and department, up and down your organisational hierarchy, and let you add scorecard information to teams in the catalog. Learn more below in the Tech Insights section.

Here’s an example for a team called “engineering”.

From this, we can see that the engineering team is doing a great job of using PagerDuty correctly, but could do better at Dependabot configuration. If there are other teams reporting to this one in the org chart then their data will be rolled up into this view also.

Add the ScorecardResultForGroup and ScorecardResultsTableForGroup Cards to Group layouts to see results like this.

You can also see this data presented in report format on a single Scorecard, and dive into the data at different levels in the org.

Bug fixes and improvements

This month has been packed with improvements.

• We’ve got a built-in Data Source that scans for errors in CODEOWNERS files.
• We’ve got a built-in Data Source that ensures your branch protection is correct.
• The built-in Snyk Data Source has been updated to use the github.com/project-slug where possible.
• We fixed some rounding errors in our Check calculations.
• We fixed a labelling issue where there were two inputs called Type on the New Check form.
• We fixed a bug where regex comparison results were exporting incorrectly.
• We fixed a bug where selected annotations or labels in the filters of Scorecards couldn’t be deselected.
• Improved the performance of Data Sources which iterate over repos containing hundreds of thousands of files.
• The “is not blank” operator used to incorrectly ask for a value. Now it doesn’t.
• We had mislabeled the “Number” type as “Integer”. This is fixed.
• Markdown is now supported in Check descriptions so you can link to supporting documentation.
• The Proxy input is now a typeahead so it’s easier to find your favorite proxy.
• Scorecard rings now calculate in a more accurate way. A Component used to have to pass all checks on a scorecard to be counted in the ring. Now all checks that are passed will contribute to the score.
• We brought consistency and sanity to the positioning of the Re-run, Recalculate and Refresh buttons on Scorecards, Checks and Data Sources.
• Fixed some bugs which would prevent scorecards from showing up in the catalog in some cases.
• GitHub based Data Sources now filter out archived repos.
• Improved a bunch of help text sections on the New Data Source page.

Catalog

Decorators

Decorators allow you to easily add metadata to the stuff you track in your Roadie Backstage catalog. Check out the blog post for full details and to learn how to use them. One simple use case is to use decorators to add a Team Charter and some links to groups in the catalog.

Bug fixes and improvements

• API specs are now searchable. Start your endpoint searches with a forward slash.
• Renamed “Create…” in the sidebar to Templates. “Create…” was ambiguous.
• We removed Tools from the sidebar and moved its pages into Administration.
• The card used for displaying Links now hides itself from the interface when there are no links.
• Catalog table column visibility is now independently set for each Kind of Entity.
• Catalog tables can now display a links column.
• Entity Titles are now displayed in the catalog table instead of name when possible.
• Admins can now change the sidebar color in the Theme settings.
• We improved the Locations Log and renamed it to Administration → Entity Locations. You can also find it in the tabs of the Import page.