Features and benefits for developers
Stay on top of your work
In modern engineering, developers spend only a part of their time coding. Every day they also have to do code reviews, resolve infrastructure problems, fix CI/CD pipelines, and respond to customer requests. Developers frequently need to check multiple systems to find out if something needs their attention. That wastes time and distracts them from coding. Email and chat notifications quickly become overwhelming, and many developers ignore them altogether. After that, this background work gets neglected and deferred. Engineers have to constantly ping each other to move it forward and get unblocked. It does not have to be like that.
CatLight can address those problems and improve the productivity of you and your team. It will automatically collect all your action items from multiple systems. CatLight can monitor your builds, releases, issues, and pull requests. It will then combine them in a prioritized action list that you can see with one click. You can customize the priority rules to match your team process.
Take a look at the CatLight tray icon to see if there are unhandled high-priority action items for you. Its color will reflect the severity of the top item on the action list. The app will show desktop notifications when important events happen, for example when your commit breaks the build, or someone needs you to review their code.
With CatLight, you no longer need to refresh and check dashboards of multiple systems or dig through hundreds of notification emails. All your to-do items are in one list, prioritized and up-to-date. Spend more time coding, less time checking, and stay on top of your work!
Have more stable CI/CD pipelines
When a CI/CD pipeline breaks down, it can block all future commits and releases. As a result, you might be unable to complete your tasks in time, and unfinished work will pile up.
CatLight can help fix broken pipelines faster. As soon as a build or release pipeline has any issues, the app will notify the team, and keep reminding them about it until the problem is solved. If you don’t have a dedicated on-call person for these types of issues, the CatLight app will help to organize the team toward the resolution. Any engineer can volunteer to investigate the issue by clicking the "I will investigate" button in the app. All other team members will be notified, so they can focus back on other work. This prevents a situation when multiple people start working on the same issue, and the situation when everyone hopes that someone else is looking at the problem. Investigating person can also add comments in the app to share the progress with the team.
Get your pull requests reviewed sooner without reminding people
In some teams, it is quite common for a pull request to sit for multiple days without being looked at. This happens because developers are not aware that they need to do a review, or have unclear priorities on when to do code reviews in relation to other tasks. As a result, you have to wait extra time to complete the work. Delayed reviews also affect the quality of code, as you might switch to other tasks while waiting for review, and lose the context of the original task.
Email and chat notifications are not particularly effective, as they are easy to miss, and most of them get outdated. You might have to resort to frequently pinging other developers, which gets them distracted and is annoying for you.
CatLight address those problems. It will add incoming pull requests to the individual action list of the developer and will notify him if it is a higher priority than his current activity. It will also keep gently reminding engineers about pending PRs with an icon color in the tray or menu bar. With CatLight it's almost impossible to forget or miss an incoming PR request.
Stay focused and reduce distractions
Developers frequently get overloaded by notifications, alerts, and requests. They get a flood of notifications from CI/CD system and issue tracker, and get pinged by their teammates about code reviews and blocking tasks. This creates an unproductive environment, where constant interruptions prevent you from getting into deep focus and working on the task efficiently.
CatLight can help developers to stay focused. It will keep track of all action items in a prioritized list, and only alert you when a higher-priority item than your current task has appeared. CatLight will also tell other team members if you are working on a specific issue or code review right now, reducing the number of pings and questions that you can get daily.
