What can Slack tell me about my developer team's culture?
Surprisingly, a lot!
We analysed data in 35,000 developer datasets from GitLab, GitHub, Slack and Google Calendar. Here are some findings:
The vast majority of messages will always be Direct messages to colleagues and that's normal. When the ratio of public vs private messages falls below 10% this can create a number of issues
More need for documentation. If solutions are not being shared openly in a searchable environment like Slack, it means you will need to formally document more.
Culture of safety. If developers are not feeling confident enough to raise challenges or solutions publicly are you seeing the effects somewhere else, for example overall code quality?
Visibility. Are the engineering leaders leading by example by being visible across the team and / or the organisation?
Some of the best performing teams we see either:
Have a higher public vs private message ratio than 10%
or
Are actively working to increase it