Startup Introduces App to Bring Predictability to the Development Process

Anaxi brings easy tracking to the 25 million active GitHub repositories


SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 11, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- More than 1.5 million organizations have 25 million active repositories (an average of 17 per organization) on GitHub, the world's largest community for developers to share, and build better software -- with no good way to keep track of everything. Anaxi, a startup co-founded by serial entrepreneurs and veterans of Apple and Docker, today launched an app that gives engineers and managers visibility on their software development projects and processes.

“It seems every other discipline within an enterprise can be tracked, scored and improved empirically except the software development process,” said Marc Verstaen, co-founder and CEO of Anaxi. “Now for the first time, engineers and managers can see where and how bottlenecks occur -- what is working and what isn’t -- leading to far more predictable development schedules and product launches.”

That is more important than ever before in today’s digital economy – with the Internet, e-commerce, Internet of Things and mobile phones – when technology is viewed as a competitive advantage with every company developing its own software.

“It was a huge challenge supporting the rapid growth of Docker's open-source community in terms of structuring and managing the GitHub project,” said Sam Alba, until recently the vice president of engineering, Docker. “Anaxi resolves this issue by providing a holistic view to help get better control of the software development process.”

Anaxi’s team conducted a Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey of 129 companies, assessing their satisfaction about the way priorities are handled in the engineering organization, and the results revealed very poor performance with scores of -25 for all companies, and -38 for enterprises. The main complaint was visibility. Backed by this data and its own experience, Anaxi’s team built a first version iPhone app, available free at the App Store, which has the following capabilities.

  • Issue Reports
    Anaxi allows users to build reports on top of their GitHub issues. Reports list issues with specific filters: a specific priority, milestone, label, status, or assignee. Users gather reports within folders, and in one glance have a view of different GitHub projects including how issues are distributed across the team and how many blockers the team has to solve before a milestone.
  • Pull Request Reports for changes pushed to GitHub
    Users have the ability to create reports that list pull requests with specific filters: labels, status, author, assignee or reviewer. This enables tracking of pull requests, for example, those created or to be reviewed by specific individuals or teams.
  • Visual Status Indicators
    Once an issue or pull request report has an alarming state, for instance, too many blockers for a project expected to be released in a few days, the report will be displayed in red. Its color will be replicated in its enclosing folder, if any. In this way, users can identify reports requiring their attention at a glance. Healthy status is indicated in green and caution in orange giving users an overall view of status at a glance.
  • Label Categories
    GitHub lets users define their labels in any way they want. Still, a best practice has emerged where projects will categorize their labels with /, such as “area/networking” in which “area” is the category for the “networking” label value. Anaxi reinforces this practice by differentiating label categories.
  • Data Confidentiality
    Anaxi founders understood the need for confidentiality about access to their GitHub issues, so the Anaxi app is designed to work without connecting to any Anaxi servers. It connects directly to the users’ GitHub repositories and builds the reports from the app itself. All data remains secure and inaccessible, even from Anaxi itself.

Anaxi will soon add report capabilities and integrate with other tools, such as Atlassian’s Jira, in addition to building apps for other platforms such as Android and web.

For more information go to www.anaxi.com/features.

About Anaxi
Co-founded by Marc Verstaen (previously executive vice president of product development at Docker) and John Lafleur (previously CEO at CodinGame) in December 2017, Anaxi is the system of record for engineering organizations that need to facilitate decision processes. Anaxi will open a new data-driven era to engineering organizations, empowering them to better allocate their development time and resources.

Editorial Contact
Joe Eckert for Anaxi
jeckert@eckertcomms.com