GigaOm Radar for Value Stream Management (VSM) v5

Value stream management (VSM) is the go-to method for software development process improvement, which is a requirement for organizations looking to deliver on their digital transformation goals. VSM ensures the value of technology delivery as defined by benefits minus costs. VSM tools and practices remove bottlenecks in the pipeline, improve efficiency, and enable organizations to understand and manage costs better. However, delivering software faster and cheaper means nothing if the resulting outputs are not of value to the business.

We recognize that the latter—business value—needs to be predicated on the former—process efficiency. Engineering management needs to know what products and services development teams are working on. At the same time, business leaders are looking to address what they see as the black box of technology delivery and seeking to measure and monitor the bang they are getting for their buck. 

At their core, VSM tools combine data integration and dashboards, pull together information from continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) and other development tooling, and enable users to see what is going on. Building on this foundation, vendors offer capabilities to better visualize and interpret the data, provide best practice insights and guidance, enable automation, and so on. For organizations looking to build a coherent picture of their software development pipeline and move away from unwieldy spreadsheets and customized business intelligence (BI) tools, there’s a lot to like about VSM. 

The right VSM tooling will depend on an organization’s IT maturity, the size of its business, and its strategic direction. Some companies may be looking to improve visibility to help managers make better decisions, while others may want to consolidate practices and standards across lines of business. Some organizations may be better suited to a general-purpose tool, while others may need one designed for their specific vertical or use case.

This is our fifth year evaluating the VSM space in the context of our Key Criteria and Radar reports. This report builds on our previous analysis and considers how the market has evolved over the last year. 

This GigaOm Radar report examines thirteen of the top VSM solutions and compares offerings against the capabilities (table stakes, key features, and emerging features) and nonfunctional requirements (business criteria) outlined in the companion Key Criteria report. Together, these reports provide an overview of the market, identify leading VSM offerings, and help decision-makers evaluate these solutions so they can make a more informed investment decision.

GIGAOM KEY CRITERIA AND RADAR REPORTS

The GigaOm Key Criteria report provides a detailed decision framework for IT and executive leadership assessing enterprise technologies. Each report defines relevant functional and nonfunctional aspects of solutions in a sector. The Key Criteria report informs the GigaOm Radar report, which provides a forward-looking assessment of vendor solutions in the sector.

To help prospective customers find the best fit for their use case and business requirements, we assess how well VSM solutions are designed to serve specific target markets and deployment models (Table 1).

For this report, we recognize the following market segments:

• Small-to-medium business (SMB): In this category, we assess solutions on their ability to meet the needs of organizations ranging from small businesses to medium-sized companies. Also assessed are departmental use cases in large enterprises, where ease of use and deployment are more important than extensive management functionality, data mobility, and feature set. 

• Large enterprises: Here, offerings are assessed on their ability to support large and business-critical projects, across multiple parts of the organization. Optimal solutions in this category have a strong focus on flexibility, performance, data services, and features that improve security and data protection. 

In addition, we recognize the following deployment models:

• SaaS: These solutions are available only in the cloud. Often designed, deployed, and managed by the service provider, they are available only from that specific provider.

• Hybrid (SaaS and on-premises connectors): In this case, the solution may be cloud-based but include provisions for on-premises agents to help with compliance, for example.

• Self-managed: With these solutions, the vendor provides the software, but the customer is responsible for installing it on compute platforms supported by the vendor. The OS or Kubernetes integration and all patching and software lifecycling is the customer’s responsibility. This model is often chosen by buyers who need to run on-premises or in private clouds where it would be impossible to route traffic to and from a SaaS solution.

Table 1. Vendor Positioning: Target Market and Deployment Model

Table 1 components are evaluated in a binary yes/no manner and do not factor into a vendor’s designation as a Leader, Challenger, or Entrant on the Radar chart (Figure 1). 

“Target market” reflects which use cases each solution is recommended for, not simply whether that group can use it. For example, if an SMB could use a solution but doing so would be cost-prohibitive, that solution would be rated “no” for SMBs.

All solutions included in this Radar report meet the following table stakes—capabilities widely adopted and well implemented in the sector:

• Value stream mapping

• Toolchain integration

• Efficiency metrics

• Visualization tools

• Process guidance

Tables 2, 3, and 4 summarize how each vendor in this research performs in the areas we consider differentiating and critical in this sector. The objective is to give the reader a snapshot of the technical capabilities of available solutions, define the perimeter of the relevant market space, and gauge the potential impact on the business.

• Key features differentiate solutions, highlighting the primary criteria to be considered when evaluating a VSM solution.

• Emerging features show how well each vendor implements capabilities that are not yet mainstream but are expected to become more widespread and compelling within the next 12 to 18 months. 

• Business criteria provide insight into the nonfunctional requirements that factor into a purchase decision and determine a solution’s impact on an organization.

These decision criteria are summarized below. More detailed descriptions can be found in the corresponding report, “GigaOm Key Criteria for Evaluating VSM Solutions.”

Key Features

• Stakeholder-based collaboration: VSM tools should enable technical and business stakeholder groups to take a collaborative approach to process improvement in order to drive better results. The visualization tools described in the table stakes (in the associated Key Criteria report) are the basis for this collaboration, allowing different stakeholders to recognize the information they receive, whether technically or business-focused, so they can align with shared efficiency and effectiveness goals. 

• Business-level insights: Efficiency metrics are a VSM table stake and are reflected in tools under the banner of software delivery analytics (SDA). With VSM effectiveness as the focus, the tools build on these analytics with outcome measures that the business will understand; for example, financial costs/benefits, ROI, or customer experience (CX), along with quality, risk, and people-related information such as productivity, relative cost, and developer well-being.

• Root cause analysis: VSM tools should be able to identify the places where process hitches and other issues are coming from, increasingly using machine learning (ML) to compare processes against industry/vendor best practices or model against “known good” blueprints based on data available to the vendor. For example, a performance metric may be able to show why a software development pipeline is taking longer than usual or what component of the pipeline is slowing things down.

• Improvement recommendations: Tools can offer recommendations to help steer both specific behaviors and more general process improvements. It identifies areas where changes or optimizations can lead to better outcomes, such as increased efficiency, reduced waste, improved quality, or higher customer satisfaction. These recommendations are usually informed by analysis, feedback, or data, and they often include specific actions or strategies that can be implemented to achieve the desired improvements.

• Value stream portfolios: While all VSM vendors offer a view into individual value streams, additional benefits come from the ability to roll up multiple value streams into composite views; for example, as portfolios based on department, target, or strategic objectives. The notion of a portfolio goes further than a composite view, however, as it reflects best practices for business and technical strategy, prioritization, and measurement of success, as defined within strategic portfolio management (SPM) and project portfolio management (PPM).

Table 2. Key Features Comparison 

Emerging Features

• FinOps alignment: FinOps, cloud cost management, and other solution categories are evolving to measure cloud effectiveness and the overall value of cloud-based deployment. The effectiveness goals of VSM and FinOps are closely aligned, if not overlapping.

• Management platforms integration: At its heart, VSM is an approach to understanding, assessing, and improving software development pipelines. Given that these sit under an expansive umbrella covering how technology is defined, developed, deployed, and operated, it makes sense that VSM is considered one facet of a broader set of practices and tooling.

• DevSecOps and compliance support: VSM-type tools can enable engineers to deliver applications in a risk-mitigated way by providing a measure of both application and process risk. This functionality links to DevSecOps and can be an enabler to application development in compliance-heavy industries. 

• GitOps and infrastructure-as-code (IaC) support: While VSM tools might already support the creation of IaC, we expect VSM to align further with emerging GitOps practices—for example, providing visibility into redeploying IaC following a runtime configuration change. This would enable the focus to move further from pipeline efficiency toward effectiveness, this time for infrastructure deployment.

Table 3. Emerging Features Comparison 

Business Criteria

• Insight-driven value focus: VSM aims to drive the business effectiveness of solutions, process optimization, prioritization of needs, and so on. VSM insights should enable decision-makers to make substantive improvements to the ways they deliver software.

• Flexibility: A VSM solution should be able to integrate with a broad set of pipeline and planning tools, with the ability to pull together disparate sources of information (potentially at volume) while minimizing the overhead of doing so (for example, with plug-in connectors rather than writing custom code).

• Scalability: Scalability in cloud computing refers to the ability to increase or decrease IT resources as needed to meet changing demand. This metric evaluates a solution’s capacity for managing very large footprints, the availability of its architecture, the level of scale actually demonstrated, and the fit of the tool for large cloud footprints.

• Ease of use: Tools should ensure relevant stakeholder groups can start to derive benefits with a minimal learning curve in terms of terminology or approach. The solution should enable engineers, managers, and strategists to customize tools according to desired best practices, meeting the organization where it is rather than requiring wholesale change before progress can be made.

• Security and compliance: VSM solutions must address security and compliance requirements to ensure that sensitive data and critical systems are adequately protected. This includes testing for vulnerabilities, data encryption, access controls, and compliance with industry regulations.

• Cost: If the goal of VSM is to measure and increase the value of software development, the entry point to tools and their licensing models becomes significant, transparently reflecting tool cost versus benefits delivered across development and operations.

Table 4. Business Criteria Comparison 

The GigaOm Radar plots vendor solutions across a series of concentric rings with those set closer to the center judged to be of higher overall value. The chart characterizes each vendor on two axes—balancing Maturity versus Innovation and Feature Play versus Platform Play—while providing an arrowhead that projects each solution’s evolution over the coming 12 to 18 months.

Figure 1. GigaOm Radar for VSM

As you can see in Figure 1, most of the vendors are found in the Innovation half of the chart, which reflects the newness of this technology and ongoing innovation and changes in it. Most of them are also on the Platform side of the chart, suggesting broader coverage of both software development and business processes. 

In the associated Key Criteria report, we discussed the bifurcation between higher-level VSM for business strategy and today’s very real need to improve engineering efficiency. While the emerging SDA sector focuses on the latter, some vendors cover both. As such, we’ve positioned vendors on the Platform Play side of the Radar chart if they offer broad support for business-down and engineering-up use cases, whereas vendors on the Feature Play side address more specific functionality. 

As a general rule, vendors on the Feature Play side are either heavily engineering-focused and are less business-centric or, alternatively, are business leader-focused with only limited engineering team interest. Still, compared to last year’s Radar report, vendors have increasingly embraced and enhanced the core capabilities of VSM.

The vendors in the Maturity half of the chart have had platforms in the VSM market for a long time. They continue to be strong players in this market and to build out their VSM functionality. They can often augment functionality at a slower pace or through acquisitions.

Products in the Innovation half of the chart include those that are automating analysis and actions to enhance and lighten the workload of engineers. They are striving to ensure that business objectives are met in a timely way and accurately. These vendors are expanding their VSM functionality at a fast pace and are poised to capitalize on these capabilities as a part of their overall strategy.

Outperformers earn that label by presenting a demonstrably short-term roadmap that will bring them more in line with both the business-centric notion and engineering focus of VSM by either merging solutions with key technology or launching extensive new features or both. 

Overall, each of the vendors we reviewed in this report brings something unique to the party and none should be ruled out. Some are aimed at helping smaller organizations versus larger ones; some are more focused on engineering versus senior management; and some help solve initial complexity versus offering a longer-term path to maturity. We would advise anyone reading this report to consider their organization’s own criteria carefully and work with a shortlist of vendors that can address their specific needs and their ability to improve.

In reviewing solutions, it’s important to keep in mind that there are no universal “best” or “worst” offerings; every solution has aspects that might make it a better or worse fit for specific customer requirements. Prospective customers should consider their current and future needs when comparing solutions and vendor roadmaps.

INSIDE THE GIGAOM RADAR

To create the GigaOm Radar graphic, key features, emerging features, and business criteria are scored and weighted. Key features and business criteria receive the highest weighting and have the most impact on vendor positioning on the Radar graphic. Emerging features receive a lower weighting and have a lower impact on vendor positioning on the Radar graphic. The resulting chart is a forward-looking perspective on all the vendors in this report, based on their products’ technical capabilities and roadmaps.

Note that the Radar is technology-focused, and business considerations such as vendor market share, customer share, spend, recency or longevity in the market, and so on are not considered in our evaluations. As such, these factors do not impact scoring and positioning on the Radar graphic.

For more information, please visit our Methodology.

Allstacks: Value Stream Intelligence Platform

Solution Overview
Allstacks Value Stream Intelligence platform unifies entire organizations around a shared source of engineering truth, delivering actionable insights and engineering investment intelligence, and provides clear visibility into the software development lifecycle (SDLC) to keep teams of engineers aligned with the needs of the business. Allstacks gives senior leaders who own software portfolios a way to see how time is invested across initiatives, allowing them to compare their organization’s actual engineering investment against planned budgets. 

Capabilities include engineering investment and resource allocation insights, process mapping and bottleneck identification, custom dashboarding and reporting, delivery forecasting, and risk analysis and alerting. Allstacks supports all of the common metrics frameworks, such as DORA, SPACE, HEART, and Flow. Allstacks also includes free developer surveys to help measure and improve developer experience.

Additionally, organizations can leverage Allstacks to produce software R&D cost capitalization reports, automating the painful and time-consuming process of data gathering for software capitalization use cases.

From a strategy perspective, Allstacks is focused on a new advanced metrics engine. It plans to further solidify the software capitalization self-service experience, add enhancements to the developer experience offering, and incorporate real-time data into the solution. The company aims to provide value for senior technology leaders, focusing heavily on executive-level personas by continuing to expand its capabilities. By helping these senior leaders understand the shape of their engineering investments, Allstacks can illustrate the difference between intended results and actual effort in terms of the areas in which engineering time/dollars are spent.

Allstacks is positioned as a Leader and Outperformer in the Innovation/PlatformPlay quadrant of the VSM Radar report.

Strengths
Allstacks scored well on a number of decision criteria, including:

• Stakeholder-based collaboration: Allstacks’ deliverables, milestones, and dashboard features paired with the focus on context and customizability makes this a functional area where Allstacks really shines. Visualizations in Allstacks support nearly all of the key ceremonies and alignment meetings across the various value stream stakeholders in technology organizations.

• Root cause analysis: Allstacks data model and platform architecture enable users to identify a problem in a product or initiative and quickly get answers down to the “who’s contributing all this churn-y code” in mere moments and with only a few clicks. 

• Improvement recommendations: Allstacks provides recommendations in several ways, such as understanding “good” in industry benchmarks, setting up alerting to identify delinquent situations quickly, establishing shared dashboards where the entire engineering organization can get on the same page, and white-glove guidance and best practices to help engineering leaders improve those benchmarks that matter to them. 

Allstacks is classified as an Outperformer given its strong, consistent release cadence of new features and enhancements across the platform. They also have a new partnership with Microsoft that is driving enhancement and tighter integrations with those solutions. In addition, they have a solid go forward roadmap.

Opportunities
Allstacks has room for improvement in a few decision criteria, including:

• Value stream portfolios: Allstacks enables users to filter or drill down into the data from high-level business strategy to the tactical individual developer level. To enhance the value stream portfolios, Allstacks should continue to make product investments to integrate engineering resource and investment views with deliverables and milestones views.

• Business-level insights: Allstacks’ insights extend beyond engineering metrics to layer on concepts around business agility. Allstacks should continue to enhance these views of cost, allocation, investment within the platform and data model, which is included as a part of its product roadmap.

• GitOps and IaC support: Allstacks does not currently support GitOps and IaC.

Purchase Considerations
Allstacks provides two pricing tiers. The premium SaaS tier starts at $400/contributor, with a contributor defined as a person supplying data that the customer wants to analyze. It is a multitenant cloud offering.

The enterprise SaaS tier starts at $650/contributor. This is a single tenant, private deployment option with US or EU regional availability. There are additional training and consulting capabilities included with the license.

Use Cases
Allstacks covers several use cases for VSM. It has a focus on roles for engineering leaders and managers, as well as on product teams. It includes streamlining engineering’s reporting and data visualization process, accurately forecasting and estimating delivery capabilities, and the ability to assess and mitigate delivery risk. In addition, it optimizes a team’s performance by tracking engineering metrics and KPIs, as well as using popular frameworks like DORA, SPACE, HEART, or Flow. The solution aims to automate the most painful and manual parts of the data-gathering process for software R&D cost capitalization.

Atlassian: Jira, Jira Align, Atlassian Analytics*

Solution Overview
Atlassian offers an extensive suite of tools that covers planning, collaboration, operations support management, DevOps, and security. Our assessment focuses on the suite’s functionality for VSM, which includes three main products—Jira Software, Jira Align with Enterprise Insights, and Atlassian Analytics. Together, these supply table stakes and key features functionality, providing the enhanced capabilities of an enterprise solution. 

Atlassian’s suite covers end-to-end project, product, and portfolio management with insights. The Jira tooling provides Flow and DORA metrics to help improve team efficiency. Atlassian Analytics can aggregate metrics across products, instances, and teams. 

The solution is flexible and extensible with many marketplace applications and integrations. The company has invested in a wide-ranging marketplace of apps and features that enhance its existing toolset. This includes extensive integrations to third-party products for DevOps, planning, testing, VSM, and support, enabling organizations to plug Jira into its existing platform. Because Jira is so widely used, it’s relatively easy to find users who have experience with this tool and its administration.

The strategic direction for Atlassian emphasizes adaptability, innovation, and alignment with emerging trends. For instance, Atlassian's VSM solutions focus on enhancing end-to-end visibility, data-driven decision-making, and collaboration across teams to deliver continuous value.

Atlassian is positioned as an Entrant and Forward Mover in the Innovation/Feature Play quadrant of the VSM Radar report.

Strengths
Atlassian scored well on a number of decision criteria, including:

• Stakeholder-based collaboration: Atlassian’s VSM solution helps organizations connect teams and tools, optimize efficiency, organize around outcomes, and address technical debt and risk. Real-time visibility and reporting keep teams focused on outcomes. 

• Value stream portfolios: Atlassian provides high-level insights into granular details, consolidating data from multiple sources to get a holistic view of a value stream across teams and products. It helps to identify bottlenecks, manage dependencies, and track how long it takes for ideas to be delivered.

• Management platforms integration: Atlassian Jira software connects to Bitbucket or other CI/CD tools, automates workflows, enforces processes, and gets deployment insights. In addition, it is part of a larger Agile/DevOps/OKR management platform and integrates with over 3,000 Marketplace apps. 

Opportunities
Atlassian has room for improvement in a few decision criteria, including:

• Root cause analysis: Atlassian currently does not provide root cause analysis in the platform.

• Improvement recommendations: While Atlassian has pre-built dashboards that enable users to identify inefficiencies, eliminate waste, reduce costs, and simplify communication processes, it could deepen and enhance the improvement recommendations process with additional data.

• Business-level insights: Atlassian Analytics provides insights into work being done across the organization that contributes to the top business objectives. It has the opportunity to expand the KPIs tracked and add further business insights.

Atlassian was classified as a Forward Mover because it has implemented relatively few new features for VSM, focusing instead on broader planning and business insights management.

Purchase Considerations
Pricing is different for Jira and Jira Align. Jira has four pricing tiers—free, standard, premium, and enterprise, each with increasing functionality and cost. There are three components to Jira Align pricing: software and user licensing (including the number of licenses purchased), advisory services if needed, and the desired level of technical support. There are also add-on costs for enterprise insights. 

To meet the requirements of this report in terms of VSM capabilities, Jira’s premium and enterprise tiers, combined with Jira Align and insights, are needed.

Use Cases
Atlassian solutions serve a variety of use cases, including end-to-end visibility, insights into work happening across the organization, helping teams identify inefficiencies and bottlenecks, streamlining processes by automating tasks and removing unnecessary steps, real-time analytics and reporting to guide strategic decisions, bridging gaps among business, DevOps, and IT teams to deliver customer value, and promoting continuous improvement. The company also provides software for specific industry sectors, including retail, telecommunications, professional services, and government, and focuses on departmental teams such as IT, HR, finance, and marketing teams.

Broadcom: ValueOps

Solution Overview
Broadcom ValueOps is an integrated VSM, portfolio management, and enterprise agile planning platform designed to connect strategic planning with execution across the enterprise. It consists of four components: Clarity, Rally, ConnectAll, and Insights.

ValueOps offers a holistic view and management of the value stream. It enables the automation of workflows, enhances toolchain connectivity, and provides real-time visibility and analytics across various stages of work. By offering a unified solution, ValueOps eliminates the complexity of managing multiple tools and processes, making it easier for organizations to achieve their strategic objectives.

For customers requiring maximum security, ValueOps is available as a FedRAMP-certified solution that combines Clarity and Rally. The full ValueOps platform can also be run on-premises or in a private cloud, allowing for even further security and data sovereignty needs.

From a strategic perspective, the overarching vision for ValueOps is to address the disconnect between strategy and execution by seamlessly connecting ideation through delivery, with governance and alignment built into every step. ValueOps enables end-to-end visibility and tight alignment between business objectives and software delivery outcomes, ensuring clarity and transparency across the entire value stream.

Broadcom is positioned as a Leader and Outperformer in the Innovation/Platform Play quadrant of the VSM Radar report.

Strengths
Broadcom scored well on a number of decision criteria, including:

• Business-level insights: Broadcom incorporates strategic and value-focused metrics such as objectives & key results (OKRs), investment guardrails, budgets, and ROI in addition to traditional DevOps (DORA, and so on) and flow metrics to provide a truly 360-degree view of the enterprise. 

• Value stream portfolios: Broadcom ValueOps has robust support for value stream portfolios, allowing users to create hierarchies and custom investment objects to model and manage a complex mix of value streams, individual products, and projects, either independently or as part of a comprehensive portfolio. 

• GitOps and IaC support: The Broadcom ValueOps platform fully supports GitOps and IaC practices, aligning with the latest in DevOps methodologies to enhance visibility, automation, and control over infrastructure changes. Through ConnectALL, ValueOps integrates with GitOps workflows, enabling teams to seamlessly redeploy IaC following runtime configuration changes. 

Broadcom is classified as an Outperformer, thanks to its extensive list of features released over the past year. In addition, it has a solid ongoing roadmap with innovative features.

Opportunities
Broadcom has room for improvement in a few decision criteria, including:

• Root cause analysis: Broadcom ValueOps aids users in identifying, managing, and resolving bottlenecks across one value stream or an entire portfolio composed of multiple teams and streams. It has the opportunity to deepen the root cause capabilities across the platform.

• Improvement recommendations: Broadcom ValueOps can perform automated data analysis and provides insights into bottlenecks and flow issues, in alignment with VSM methodology best practices. The company should continue to expand the recommendation capabilities to make it easier to implement suggestions and efficiencies.

• FinOps alignment: Broadcom ValueOps supports FinOps natively, with a comprehensive view of software development costs, resource utilization, and investment outcomes. It has the opportunity to build additional FinOps features on the platform for continued alignment. 

Purchase Considerations
All four products come with the Broadcom Portfolio License Agreement (PLA) model. This is the preferred licensing model, and it includes unlimited use of all VSM products for a negotiated price for a fixed term. It includes all features for each product without any add-ons or plugins required. 

Licenses are also available individually for Rally, Clarity, ValueOps ConnectAll, and ValueOps Insights. All have potential discounting available, and all can be extended to include many other capabilities from the wider Broadcom portfolio, including robust tools for NetOps, AIOps, DevOps, security, and mainframes. These capabilities are offered in a variety of combinations, depending on customer requirements.

All paid ValueOps subscriptions include 24/7 support via phone and email. Broadcom offers VSM consulting services both directly and through its network of certified partners. 

Use Cases
ValueOps’ key use cases include strategic alignment and execution, agile and DevOps transformation, digital product management, and strategic portfolio management. Any industry or department can benefit from these key use cases. The solution supports teams in their particular operational contexts, enabling a variety of methodologies within the same organization. This ensures that data roll-up and reporting capabilities are maintained, providing cohesive insights across disparate workflows

CloudBees: CloudBees Platform

Solution Overview
CloudBees brings development, operations, product, and business teams together to optimize the overall health of product delivery and the CXs they provide. Its solution is a DevSecOps platform that offers an integration hub with a common data model, plus the ability to define and build value streams. Analytics enable a view of software delivery and release velocity over time, incorporating DevOps research and both assessment metrics such as DORA and Flow and business-facing metrics, which can be measured and presented in real time, enabling root cause analysis—for example, linking net promoter scores (NPS) following a product release to pipeline issues or technical measures such as mean time to recovery (MTTR). 

CloudBees benefits enterprises looking to capture, simplify, and standardize their pipelines and take back control of fragmented approaches to software delivery. Both vision and tooling are geared toward addressing the complexity challenges faced by large-scale customers, bringing together often home-grown “islands of automation” and enabling common standards to be rolled out.

CloudBees' strategic direction focuses on enhancing its product offerings for continuous integration, continuous delivery, and release orchestration, to meet the growing demand for secure and efficient software delivery solutions. It is also prioritizing AI-driven advancements, such as automated testing and smart analytics, to streamline development processes and improve software quality.

CloudBees is positioned as a Challenger and Fast Mover in the Maturity/Platform Play quadrant of the VSM Radar chart.

Strengths
CloudBees scored well on a number of decision criteria, including:

• Root cause analysis: CloudBees helps to isolate the root cause of problems within multiple types of environments. By leveraging tools like performance decision trees, it guides users through a systematic troubleshooting process. This includes analyzing slow navigation, high CPU or memory consumption, and job execution delays.

• Improvement recommendations: CloudBees generates analytics around outcomes, such as release cadence, wait times, unplanned work, and resource load, with guidance insights available out of the box. It enables analysis of metrics to perform tasks such as identifying and addressing bottlenecks. The tool offers visibility of metrics across a value stream or as an aggregated view by-project, application, or environment, usable from engineering leadership down to individual teams.

• DevSecOps and compliance support: CloudBees visualizes the software delivery process using key DevOps performance metrics including: deployment frequency (DF), mean lead time (MLT), MTTR, change failure rate (CFR) and other metrics. The platform integrates with existing DevOps pipelines and tools, automating security and compliance checks to reduce manual effort for developers. Real-time dashboards offer insights into security posture and compliance status.

Opportunities
CloudBees has room for improvement in a few decision criteria, including:

• Business-level insights: CloudBees does not provide business level insights for things such as OKRs. It has a strong engineering focus, rather than targeting business vision and customer experience.

• Value stream portfolios: While CloudBees provides release portfolio information, it does not have a top down values stream portfolio capability. 

• Stakeholder-based collaboration: CloudBees enables teams to connect their pipelines, allowing one pipeline to trigger jobs in another. It has the opportunity to build on this collaboration and add business-level collaboration. 

Purchase Considerations
Cloudbees has launched a new pricing and packaging. It will use user and consumption pricing and move away from the previous nodes pricing model. There are three editions for enterprises, each offering a hybrid purchasing experience for SaaS and self-managed solutions as a single SKU. With a license, CloudBees customers have access to CloudBees technical support. Professional services and training are also offered.

Use Cases
Use cases go beyond VSM and include managing the lifecycle end to end, measuring and improving the application value stream flow, and orchestration across pipelines, applications, tools, and teams for contextualization and analytics.

Digital.ai: AI-Powered DevOps Platform

Solution Overview
Digital.ai provides comprehensive VSM capabilities paired with solutions that support the day-to-day execution and ongoing improvement of agile and DevOps processes. Its AI-powered DevOps Platform bundles a number of products, including Agility, Continuous Testing, Release, Deploy, Application Security, and Intelligence. This solution focuses on the business value of technology creation and delivery.

Digital.ai recognizes the heterogeneous nature of the enterprise and does not require a rip-and-replace approach. Teams can continue to use their tools of choice to manage their agile delivery, testing, and deployment automation. The company does not require customers to adopt modern cloud and microservices architectures first. They can adopt the platform by degrees and tailor a VSM roadmap that best fits their unique situation.

Value stream maps can be represented graphically. At a higher level, the platform offers scorecard-based planning and target setting, enabling organizations to build portfolios of activity based on business value delivery, which can then be measured over time.

From a strategic perspective, Digital.ai Agility is focused on helping enterprises align strategic goals with day-to-day operations through native OKR management, enhancing  features like OKR linking across all organizational levels and improving OKR visibility. 

Digital.ai is positioned as a Leader and Fast Mover in the Maturity/Platform Play quadrant of the VSM Radar report.

Strengths
Digital.ai scored well on a number of decision criteria, including:

• Root cause analysis: Digital.ai offers AI/ML solutions built on value stream data models as part of the prepackaged analytical applications. Quality Improvement includes predictions around future defect patterns, and Service Management Process Optimization includes AI/ML solutions for major incident prediction as well as incident topic clustering.

• Business-level insights: Digital.ai Agility supports business strategy themes, budgets, roadmaps, and portfolio-level planning to capture, calculate, and track metrics, KPIs, OKRs (linking across all organizational levels) and other forms of analysis related to business value. Out-of-the-box metrics and integrations drive efficiency, manage value flow, and optimize program investments.

• Management platforms integration: Digital.ai enables integration with both DevOps and broader applications (such as Zendesk or SAP). Many tools in mainstream use are plug-and-play, including Rally and Jira, and custom plug-ins can be created for other tools. 

Opportunities
Digital.ai has room for improvement in a few decision criteria, including:

• Improvement recommendations: Digital.ai offers capabilities for process, quality, and risk-based guidance, so that organizations can improve their processes over time. It has the opportunity to expand these recommendations to additional areas of the platform.

• Stakeholder-based collaboration: Digital.ai allows users to correlate business objectives with application performance metrics to determine value delivered. It has the opportunity to deepen and enhance this collaboration.

• Value stream portfolios: Digital.ai enables teams to align their work with strategic objectives by organizing initiatives into portfolios that reflect business priorities. These portfolios help track dependencies, progress, and delivery timelines. Digital.ai has the opportunity to enhance the features that align portfolios to business objectives.

Purchase Considerations
The solution is subscription based and offers three levels of packaging: essentials, professional, and premium, providing additional value at each tier. The company offers professional services or technical account managers depending on customer needs, and support can also vary according to a customer's needs.

Use Cases
Digital.ai’s goal is to automate the entire software delivery cycle from agile planning, testing, and security to release orchestration and deployment management, in addition to integrating all user personas.

GitLab

Solution Overview
The developers of GitLab wanted the platform to include not just agile planning functions but engineering-level deployment management, operations, and security as well. GitLab, therefore, provides a single platform for all DevSecOps processes, from agile planning to continuous integration, deployment, monitoring, security, and value stream management. 

As a single, open source-based platform with a unified data store, GitLab already consolidates information from common tools across the development process, enabling coherent, configurable value stream dashboards based on a singular information source. Analytics enables visualization of time spent at feature, epic, and business levels. Value streams can be tracked as groups, which is not strictly a portfolio view but is very helpful.

From a strategic perspective, GitLab continues to focus on a point of differentiation of its single application approach: all aspects of DevSecOps platform work seamlessly together, right out of the box, and can be tailored to the specific needs of each organization. In addition, GitLab is working to deepen key features of the DevSecOps solution.

GitLab is positioned as a Challenger and Fast Mover in the Innovation/Platform Play quadrant of the VSM Radar report.

Strengths
GitLab scored well on a number of decision criteria, including:

• Root cause analysis: GitLab Duo Root Cause Analysis keeps all users in the same interface, and its AI-powered help summarizes and analyzes issues and proposes fixes so that organizations can release secure software faster. 

• Value stream portfolios: GitLab's Value Stream Analytics and Management tools are designed to optimize workflows and identify bottlenecks. Value stream analytics identifies waste and surface improvement opportunities to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of development teams.

• DevSecOps and compliance support: GitLab emphasizes embedding security practices at every stage of development, and thus includes tools for static and dynamic application security testing, and dependency and container scanning to identify vulnerabilities early. It offers features like audit event tracking, compliance pipelines, and merge request approval policies to enforce regulatory standards and maintain transparency. 

Opportunities
GitLab has room for improvement in a few decision criteria, including:

• Improvement recommendations: GitLab provides guidelines and recommendations for improving workflows, security, and performance. It has the opportunity to broaden these recommendations to additional areas of the solution.

• Business-level insights: GitLab gives all users one platform on which to collaborate and see everything from planning to production, to drive continuous improvement with visibility across the entire software delivery process. It has the opportunity to deepen the insights across additional areas of the platform.

• FinOps alignment: GitLab provides tools and strategies to monitor, analyze, and control cloud expenses, enabling organizations to align their cloud usage with business objectives. It has the opportunity to grow the FinOps capabilities further to match others.

Purchase Considerations
VSM is not available as a standalone product, and GitLab has a tiered approach to licensing for the overall platform. The entry level is free and has limits on users, storage, transactions, and features. With more users, features, and storage, the Premium tier is ideal for scaling and multiteam coordination. The Ultimate tier is geared toward enterprise organizations, with enhanced security, value stream management, and improved license use.

Use Cases
GitLab is a DevSecOps platform with agile and value stream management capabilities. It has a broad set of use cases supporting engineering development, security, and deployment. For VSM in particular, the use cases focus on breaking down silos, optimizing workflows, and gaining insights.

IBM: DevOps Velocity*

Solution Overview
IBM DevOps Velocity is a module in the DevOps Accelerate product. It can accelerate and optimize software delivery for any mix of on-premises, cloud, and mainframe applications. It is an enterprise-scale release management application that delivers pipeline orchestration and real-time analytics. 

IBM brings a “data lake” view to data generated throughout and beyond the development cycle. Fed from this data lake, IBM DevOps Velocity offers customizable dashboards that provide visual insights aimed at engineers and managers. This enables project and portfolio views across factors like cycle times and code quality, which can then be compared in terms of delivery efficiency. Understandably, the insights reach high into engineering leadership and business stakeholders, such as the revenue board. They also go wide, bringing in service management and operations, customers, and users.

From a strategic perspective, IBM DevOps Velocity is an engineering-centric solution focused on enhancing DevOps features for software delivery. This includes pipeline orchestration, governance, and real-time analytics.

IBM is positioned as an Entrant and Forward Mover in the Maturity/Feature Play quadrant of the VSM Radar report.

Strengths
IBM scored well on a number of decision criteria, including:

• Stakeholder-based collaboration: IBM provides a real-time view into DevOps pipelines, from idea to production. It integrates real-time analytics and visualization tools to help teams monitor and optimize their DevOps pipelines.

• Root cause analysis: IBM allows teams to pinpoint bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and failures in the value stream. This helps organizations not only resolve immediate problems but also implement preventive measures to avoid recurrence. The platform's integration capabilities ensure that RCA is seamlessly embedded into the DevOps workflow.

• Management platforms integration: IBM DevOps Velocity offers seamless integration with various management platforms, including GitLab, Jenkins, and Tekton.

Opportunities
IBM has room for improvement in a few decision criteria, including:

• Improvement recommendations: IBM provides visibility into DevOps metrics across applications and teams to improve performance in data, service desk, and applications. It has the opportunity to broaden the visibility to other parts of the platform.

• Value stream portfolios: IBM provides limited portfolio capabilities from a value stream perspective. It does provide team-focused visibility into DevOps metrics.

• FinOps alignment: IBM DevOps Velocity does not contain FinOps features, but  IBM offers other solutions for FinOps alignment. 

IBM was classified as a Forward Mover for value stream management, as it has implemented fewer new features for VSM compared to DevOps capabilities.

Purchase Considerations
IBM DevOps Velocity is delivered as a SaaS offering, as a free community edition (for only two users, though this is enough to get started), and as a standard edition with a 60-day trial. Further pricing information is available from the company.

Use Cases
The use cases for DevOps Velocity center around gaining DevOps metrics for pipelines, helping to manage releases, improving auditability with controls and visibility, and bringing visibility to heterogeneous pipelines across different integration and delivery tools.

LinearB

Solution Overview
LinearB offers a solution focused on engineering leadership, recognizing the need for development teams to report progress and deliver predictability to the business. The solution draws information from across the software development lifecycle, enabling measures around time and effort spent on projects, initiatives, and epics, as well as costs.

Comprehensive dashboards offer DORA metrics as well as development cycle time, workflow bottlenecks, and developer health. These enable managers to see discrepancies between expectations and reality based on measures such as the quantity of code being changed, its complexity, and the expected time to deliver. These can be organized by projects, teams, portfolios, and so on. 

The solution offers a resourcing dashboard showing how effectively staff has been assigned to tasks over time. This can work by issue or investment type; for example, it can be used to show the VP of engineering or CTO where the bottlenecks are and how to allocate resources more effectively, first at a high level and then at increasing levels of granularity. 

LinearB's strategic direction focuses on becoming the AI orchestrator of choice for enterprise engineering teams. It aims to enhance engineering productivity and developer experience by leveraging AI-driven workflows and governance.

LinearB is positioned as a Challenger and Fast Mover in the Innovation/Platform Play quadrant of the VSM Radar report.

Strengths
LinearB scored well on a number of decision criteria, including:

• Business-level insights: LinearB provides dashboards and metrics that translate engineering performance into business outcomes. It helps align engineering efforts with organizational goals by offering insights into resource allocation, project costs, and delivery timelines. 

• Root cause analysis: LinearB focuses on identifying and addressing inefficiencies in the software delivery process. It provides actionable insights through automated workflows and visualizations, enabling teams to diagnose issues quickly and implement improvements.

• DevSecOps and compliance support: LinearB integrates security into the software delivery lifecycle, enabling teams to standardize security practices. In addition, it provides tools to automate and operationalize compliance standards across repositories.

Opportunities
LinearB has room for improvement in a few decision criteria, including:

• Stakeholder-based collaboration: While LinearB enhances collaboration by integrating with tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams that allow stakeholders to stay aligned, it has the opportunity to enhance this collaboration by providing information at all levels of the organization.

• Value stream portfolios: Although the LinearB platform provides visibility for engineering leaders to optimize workflows and improve productivity, it is more product focused than portfolio focused. It has an opportunity to add value stream portfolio views to the solution.

• FinOps alignment: LinearB does not have cloud cost management in the scope of the platform, though it does offer visibility into project cost and cost capitalization. 

Purchase Considerations
LinearB offers a tiered licensing model. The first tier, a good starting point to learn about the product, is free, with basic features and integrations. The business tier starts with 50 contributors and can scale up. It adds features and integrations and starts at $49 per month per contributor. The enterprise tier offers the most features and integrations and has custom pricing. Each tier includes increasing levels of support, training, and professional services.

Use Cases
LinearB has a strong engineering focus on integrating various software development lifecycle tools, measuring metrics throughout the lifecycle, and automating workflows. 

The company started with a focus on mid-market companies but is increasingly working with enterprise customers. For example, LinearB is adding auditability to satisfy the needs of more regulated industries. In addition, startups use LinearB to find bottlenecks, improve the developer experience, scale teams, and streamline code delivery.

OpenText: Core Software Delivery Platform (SDP)

Solution Overview
OpenText Core Software Delivery Platform is a modular end-to-end SaaS solution that encompasses strategy through delivery. It provides a comprehensive, unified data model that underpins all value stream elements across the platform. It supports unlimited value streams and third-party tool integrations, with built-in data normalization capabilities. The platform's integration framework ensures consistent data normalization across diverse tools to enable accurate flow metrics, waste identification, and value measurements. 

OpenText Core SDP consists of the following modules: Strategy, Agile, Quality, Release Management, and Insights. Aviator AI is available across the board to provide AI-based insights and time/cost savings to various personas in the organization. Functional Test and Performance Test are optional. OpenText Connect serves as an integration and synchronization layer to align multiple data sources to the data fabric used for VSM analysis and DevOps optimization. Customers can adopt the modules at their own pace. 

Over the next year, OpenText Core SDP will continue to lead in AI-driven VSM by enhancing predictive analytics, automation, and enterprise-wide interoperability. The focus is on deepening AI capabilities, expanding integrations with DevOps and ITSM ecosystems, and refining user-driven insights to help organizations optimize software delivery and maximize business value.

OpenText is positioned as a Leader and Outperformer in the Maturity/Platform Play quadrant of the VSM Radar report.

Strengths
OpenText scored well on a number of decision criteria, including:

• Stakeholder-based collaboration: OpenText Core SDP offers features that enable stakeholder-based collaboration across business, engineering, and other teams, helping them work toward shared goals, including persona-specific dashboards, collaborative visualizations, and integrated insights across teams.

• Improvement recommendations: OpenText Core SDP offers improvement recommendations through its AI/ML-driven capabilities, including AI-based guidance, process optimization, and industry best practices, plus process simulations. 

• Value stream portfolios: OpenText Core SDP supports value stream portfolios and allows the roll-up of value streams into composite views based on various criteria. This functionality ensures that organizations can have a comprehensive and flexible view of their value streams, supporting both long-term planning and ongoing operations.

OpenText is classified as an Outperformer, thanks to its continued releases that enhance and add new features on a regular basis. It has a solid go forward roadmap as well.

Opportunities
OpenText has room for improvement in a few decision criteria, including:

• Business-level insights: OpenText Core SDP offers out-of-the-box business-level insights that focus on key business metrics while also considering developer well-being. The company has the opportunity to deepen the metrics used for these insights.

• Root cause analysis: OpenText Core SDP provides root cause analysis capabilities, leveraging AI/ML to identify issues across value streams and pinpoint the underlying causes. It could expand the root cause analysis to additional areas.

• FinOps alignment: OpenText Core SDP does not specifically offer FinOps or cloud cost management features. However, the solution is evolving to measure cloud effectiveness and align with FinOps principles in future releases.

Purchase Considerations
OpenText Core SDP is typically offered on a subscription basis, with pricing tiers based on usage, the number of users, or the scale of deployment. The solution is designed to align with the cost models of prospective client bases, making it suitable for engineering teams at smaller companies or larger enterprises with scalable pricing that grows with usage. As the client organization scales and embraces VSM, costs may increase with additional users, teams, or pipelines. However, the business value, productivity gains, and cost reductions in processes often justify these increases over time. There is generally no sticker shock, as the solution is designed for gradual expansion.

Customers can benefit from kickstart programs, potentially including training resources, community editions, and accelerators to help onboard users efficiently and drive productivity from the outset.

OpenText Core SDP includes support services, typically via email or on-call, with 24/7 availability depending on the support package selected. VSM consulting services are typically available through direct offerings or partners. These services are priced based on the scope and scale of engagement, with options for on-demand or ongoing consulting available to assist with implementation or advanced use cases.

Use Cases
The OpenText Core Software Development Platform modules support a variety of use cases including value stream management, agile planning capabilities, strategic portfolio management, program management, application lifecycle management, quality management, risk management, release management, business analytics and intelligence, continuous quality, DevOps and DevSecOps, enterprise agile, scaled agile, and AI-enable software delivery.

Planview: Planview VSM Solution

Solution Overview
Planview's VSM solution comprises software, integrations, and accompanying methodology to enable organizations to achieve their transformation objectives by connecting and optimizing the flow of work from ideas to impact. It helps organizations shift from project- to product-centric approaches, improve time-to-market and predictability; increase efficiency to unlock capacity; manage technical debt, and mitigate risk through improved compliance. A common schema provides traceability across stages and consolidates data from 60-plus lifecycle tools into a unified framework for step-by-step and holistic delivery analysis. 

Planview’s solution gives users visibility into their work processes and delivery predictability through an actionable dashboard and set of analytics so they can align work to strategic initiatives and optimize outcomes using automations and data science.

Generative AI is embedded throughout the solution to enhance the analysis and provide recommendations to improve software delivery.

Planview’s VSM vision is to enable enterprises to establish a highly adaptable, productive, and efficient operating model that translates strategy into delivery. Planview can serve as the management system for every organization on its journey from project to product. In a single integrated platform, enterprises are able to define their strategic investments, set objectives, manage multiple types of planning (including project- and product-centric), optimize delivery with flow, and implement modern governance mechanisms. 

Planview is positioned as a Leader and Outperformer in the Innovation/Platform Play quadrant of the VSM Radar report.

Strengths
Planview scored well on a number of decision criteria, including:

• Business-level insights: Planview’s solution was designed to provide end-to-end software delivery metrics that align with business results. It provides easy one-click access to insights, information, and actions that are personalized to a role. VSM dashboards provide metrics in the context of other business-level insights, which align delivery teams to measurable outcomes and build the business case for investment. Flow Metrics are featured alongside business results and aligned with OKRs.

• Value stream portfolios: Planview offers a portfolio/group view for leader personas who manage multiple products, product lines, or portfolios. Visibility rolls up to each level in the hierarchy, in a manner that allows leaders to quickly identify problem areas and focus their attention where it's needed most. Planview Copilot can create and customize reports for any purpose at either the portfolio or product levels.

• Management platforms integration: Planview has over 60 out-of-the-box third-party connectors that span planning, execution, and delivery. 

Planview is classified as an Outperformer because it has a consistent release cadence with a significant amount of new features and enhanced functionality. It also has a strong go forward roadmap.

Opportunities
Planview has room for improvement in a few decision criteria, including:

• Root cause analysis: While the Planview VSM solution has differentiated capabilities to identify root cause and make a compelling case for change, it has the opportunity to add additional root cause analysis features. 

• Improvement recommendations: Planview's solution uses features like Flow Optimizer to deliver insights and recommend prescriptive improvements to address aged and cancelled work. Planview Copilot makes recommendations and offers summaries as well. The company has an opportunity to broaden features that make the best proactive recommendations for improvements.

• FinOps alignment: Planview does not currently support cloud costing capabilities. However, organizations can use the data in the Planview platform as the basis of software labor expense capitalization reporting, eliminating the need to manually enter and categorize work.

Purchase Considerations
Planview’s VSM products are sold separately or bundled as a solution. This allows customers to start where the pain is most acute (visibility or integration) and add the other solutions when they’re ready. 

Planview has a tiered pricing model with add-on professional services available. Planview licenses are per user, with packages starting at 300 users. Service packages are priced according to the scope of the implementation and the level of support for a customer’s request. Planview’s standard customer care addresses software issues that are submitted by defined administrators or authorized users. Premium models are also available and can include extended hours, advanced troubleshooting, and executive business reviews.

Use Cases
Key use cases for Planview include: software toolchain integration, which accelerates product development with enterprise integration of tools and applications with third-party suppliers and development partners so they have visibility into their entire digital supply chain; VSM engineering efficiency that supports visibility across the software development lifecycle, including integration, Flow Metrics, and actionable insights; and digital product development, which supports product management aligned to strategy with flow-creating business agility to rapidly adapt, communicate, and implement revised plans based on changes. 

What Planview offers is a  product operating model solution from strategy to delivery, which includes capabilities such as strategy management, scenario analysis, financial planning, roadmapping, quarterly and agile planning, value stream management, Flow and DORA metrics, and OKR management, supported by an extensible data platform and embedded AI.

ServiceNow: Now Platform

Solution Overview
ServiceNow aims to provide enterprise visibility, enhanced usability, and effective prioritization. It plays in the VSM space by virtue of its general workflow management, automation, integration, and collaboration platform, amply covering our VSM table stakes. The solution leverages the ServiceNow Now Platform, which provides visibility at every step, from idea to operations.

ServiceNow’s Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) solution aligns strategy with work effort. This coordination enables planning, tracking, and delivery of value across the organization. The Now Platform provides visibility from idea to operations. The solution offers the Common Service Data Model (CSDM), which integrates with a wide variety of tools (though not as many as some software development-specific platforms). Value stream mapping and visualization of key data are available out of the box, and DevOps process guidance aligns with SAFe principles. The platform builds in ML-based capabilities to identify development bottlenecks and suggest resolutions, and root cause analysis capabilities can be customized to fit software pipelines.

Strategically, ServiceNow is continuing to extend the advantages of the Now Platform across software development and deployment processes, to simplify and scale enterprise DevOps. It is expanding the integration with the DevOps tool chain to create an end-to-end audit trial for reduced risk. 

ServiceNow is positioned as a Challenger and Fast Mover in the Maturity/Platform Play quadrant of the VSM Radar report.

Strengths
ServiceNow scored well on a number of decision criteria, including:

• Root cause analysis: ServiceNow’s Root Cause Analysis (RCA) is a structured process used to identify the underlying cause of problems that are difficult to diagnose. 

• Improvement recommendations: ServiceNow leverages embedded GenAI and machine learning to provide proactive recommendations. 

• DevSecOps & compliance support: ServiceNow includes comprehensive tooling across IT operations and service delivery. 

Opportunities
ServiceNow has room for improvement in a few decision criteria, including:

• Value stream portfolios: ServiceNow has an additional plugin containing the data model artifacts required for value stream management. The core data model enables the creation of value streams and can also break them down into various stages; however, this is an add-on feature.

• Business-level insights: ServiceNow has flow dashboards that link through to operational and customer-facing data. It has an opportunity to expand and enhance these reporting capabilities with additional insights.

• GitOps and IaC support: While ServiceNow supports GitOps and IIaC practices through its DevOps solutions, it does require an additional  DevOps solution. 

Purchase Considerations
Most pricing is available from its sales team with a custom quote based on a customer's needs assessment. ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management offers two packages. The standard package includes core agile planning, resource management, and core portfolio planning focused on single teams and small groups of teams. The professional package includes all features of the standard package with added functionality, like strategic portfolio planning, a scaled agile framework, and predictive analytics focused on customers with multiple teams managing complex dependencies.

Use Cases
The Now Platform can serve a variety of industries and use cases. Executives and team leaders can employ VSM as a strategic tool to help clarify and simplify business-wide initiatives. At the same time, developers and specialists can benefit from VSM by creating more-direct roadmaps and less wasteful production processes, enabling them to consistently produce more and better products.

Waydev

Solution Overview
Waydev is a software engineering intelligence platform designed to help engineering leaders make a shift to a data-driven approach to engineering leadership with the help of DORA metrics, the SPACE framework, and AI. 

Waydev largely focuses on stakeholders from engineering out, particularly engineering managers and their teams (who may use the tool daily) and engineering leadership (VPs and directors), who need more of an overview to present to their business colleagues. 

The core of the product is built around data dashboards, bringing in data from Git itself, and then from common development pipeline tools (across CI/CD, issue tracking, and so forth). Plug-ins exist for a number of tools. Dashboards and widgets offer nested views of metrics, from epics down to individual tasks, with common views (such as DORA and cycle time) available out of the box. These views can be customized by team (such as kanban or scrum).

From a strategic perspective, Waydev is focused on expanding capabilities for its AI Agents, AI Auto Targets, AI Prediction, and AI adoption with metrics from GitHUB Copilot. The company is working to deepen existing features for value stream management and developer experiences. It is expanding its base of enterprise customers.

Waydev is positioned as a Challenger and Fast Mover in the Innovation/Feature Play quadrant of the VSM Radar report.

Strengths
Waydev scored well on a number of decision criteria, including:

• Stakeholder-based collaboration: Waydev offers features that support stakeholder-based collaboration. It enables a collaborative approach across business and engineering teams by allowing different stakeholder groups to engage with the data and insights that are relevant to them. 

• Improvement recommendations: Waydev's Software Intelligence platform offers insights into project, team, and contributor progress by benchmarking insights against industry best practices and past progress. This comparison helps identify trends and areas for improvement. 

• Management platforms integration: Waydev offers integration with management platforms, enhancing the solution's capability to support the entire software development lifecycle. This includes VSM as a core component.

Opportunities
Waydev has room for improvement in a few decision criteria, including:

• Root cause analysis: Waydev does not specifically offer a root cause analysis feature, but it provides a variety of metrics that managers and leaders can use to analyze the underlying causes of issues. Waydev could incorporate features supporting root cause analysis.

• Value stream portfolios: Waydev focuses on the product and team portfolio levels versus values stream portfolios. It has an opportunity to expand its portfolio reporting to incorporate value stream portfolio level information. 

• DevSecOps & compliance support: Waydev does not support DevSecOps and compliance support capabilities. 

Purchase Considerations
Waydev is licensed per contributor per year, and the price is $648 for one Premium Plan license and $348 for a PRO plan license. The solution includes support via the customer success team, which is available on call, email, and live chat systems 24/7. The cost is influenced only by the number of contributors. 

Regarding kickstart programs, the customer success team handles onboarding and initial training sessions so all users are familiar with the tool. The solution targets enterprise companies looking for a software engineering intelligence platform. 

Use Cases
Waydev supports a variety of use cases, including identifying bottlenecks in a team’s development process; aligning engineering work with product and business strategy; measuring and optimizing software delivery; identifying best practices to replicate across the organization; benchmarking team performance against organization and industry performance; improving team health and developer experience (DX); improving team collaboration and knowledge sharing; and validating assumptions with data.

Zenhub

Solution Overview
Zenhub, which evolved out of a management layer running on top of the popular GitHub repository, has historically been more developer-centric, but this orientation is changing. A primary goal remains increasing engineering team efficiency and satisfaction, while bringing together development and project tools. 

Zenhub has a strong engineering-first approach, and it takes minimal work to deploy it in a GitHub environment. The solution offers multi repository integration and visibility. The product provides a project management layer on top of application development, offering a kanban view of development stages, along with guidance. Visualization dashboards are based on development workflow sprints, or on stages such as “in development” or “ready to merge,” and these are referred to as pipelines. Dashboards highlight productivity bottlenecks and offer delivery estimates. 

Rather than focusing exclusively on DORA metrics, the solution is more concerned with velocity and flow measures, burndown, and delivery. A focus is placed on unplanned work. The tool enables managers to see where to invest to address this issue. It also considers how incorrect use of Git-based labeling can result in lower-quality tracking data, offering parallel tracking techniques. As a product offering analytics and a management layer for Git, its roadmap has been driven by figuring out how to address challenges in the software delivery process. 

ZenHub’s strategic direction emphasizes leveraging engineering metrics to drive strategic success and optimize team performance. It focuses on providing tools and insights that help organizations balance strategic and operational work, allocate resources effectively, and enhance productivity.

Zenhub is positioned as an Entrant and Fast Mover in the Innovation/Feature Play quadrant of the VSM Radar report.

Strengths
Zenhub scored well on a number of decision criteria, including:

• Stakeholder-Based Collaboration: Zenhub brings a roadmap creation and measurement capability, enabling feature sets (as agile epics) and initiatives to be scoped and prioritized and their progress monitored across teams.

• Improvement recommendations: Zenhub has “insights and recommendations” to help people improve. In addition, it provides guidance around team velocity and other metrics. Improvements are linked to industry best practices, Scrum, and  SAFe guidance.

• GitOps and IaC support: Zenhub’s focus is GitHub extraction to support GitOps and Dev. It is supported tangentially via the deep integration with GitHub.

Opportunities
Zenhub has room for improvement in a few decision criteria, including:

• Root cause analysis: Zenhub does not have this functionality and it is not on the current roadmap.  

• Value stream portfolios: Zenhub does not offer a top-down business view or portfolio management. It relies on customization of the work breakdown schedule functionality to roll up some of this information.

• FinOps alignment: Zenhub does not have this functionality and it is not on the current roadmap. 

Purchase Considerations
Zenhub has three pricing tiers. A free version is built for small teams, with essential features and a single workspace. The teams tier is designed for growing teams, with AI-powered tools, automation, and real-time reporting. The enterprise tier is built for large teams with AI automation, advanced security, support for on premises deployment, custom reports, and dedicated support. All include community and email support.

Use Cases
Zenhub focuses on development teams, project managers, and product owners. The solution aims to integrate project management capabilities into the developer’s workflow and works with GitHub to enhance and simplify the development process.

The chaotic and inefficient nature of today's software development environments has spurred the evolution of the VSM market. Software, with its virtually limitless potential, tends to grow in complexity and capability unless effectively controlled. This uncontrolled expansion has led to a situation where organizations face escalating costs, inefficient processes, and ambiguous outcomes, despite aiming to become more digitalized and efficient.

While there is no single solution or quick fix to this problem, organizations can implement strategies and tools that acknowledge these challenges. They can apply techniques to minimize the chaos and maximize their results.

VSM takes a highly valuable process-oriented view of software delivery, applying controls and looking for improvement opportunities. However, it isn’t the only game in town. As noted earlier, engineering managers can also benefit from a view into their teams’ activities (as offered by SDA). Meanwhile, agile frameworks such as SAFe offer the structure that has so often been lacking. Equally so, right-the-first-time models, from low/no code to GitOps, reduce the scale of the problem. In some solutions, these different approaches are merging and they complement each other.

When reviewing VSM vendors, potential buyers should take a number of factors into account. First, a VSM solution is not a silver bullet; second, other options exist (which can act in tandem); third, solutions are evolving dynamically; fourth, the industry hasn’t helped itself by allowing this situation to come about in the first place; and finally, every organization will be at a different point on its own journey. 

VSM incorporates three directions: portfolio down, analytics up, and orchestration across. Some vendors are focused on a top-down portfolio approach, which requires an organization to be fully on board to deliver the biggest gains. Other vendors have found it better to deliver on longer-term goals than tactical wins, avoiding the glass ceiling of land-and-expand models (in which one team may have adopted something successfully, but then must convince other teams to do the same). 

Analytics-up vendors take the stance that not all organizations are ready for such a strategic approach, which requires board-level buy-in. In the third (overlapping) group are vendors that lead with orchestration and automation. Some vendors are not strictly VSM, and they offer more real-time data and reduce manual inefficiency. Efficiency measures are about time to fix; effectiveness measures are about value delivery rate. 

The expression “meet customers where they are” is a repeated theme across VSM vendors. This is important because it suggests that the aspirational view of management needs to be subordinate to the reality that engineering management is still looking to get on top of the complexities of its domain. All vendors recognize the role of DORA metrics, which give a temperature check of the state of engineering, and most now view “value flow” metrics as more important, showing a measure of progression, rather than speed. 

More recent advances in VSM are focused on data and how to manage the mountains of it across disparate tools. Data often lacks standards and governance. It is difficult and slow to collect and correlate the information. Several vendors are starting to look at the interoperability of information, with the goal of creating a common reference that makes it easier to collect, organize, and attribute data from many sources to facilitate VSM.

We’re aware that for organizations working with inefficient processes, all the tools highlighted here offer something to help improve that pipeline and none should be ruled out. Given the variety of licensing models (by engineer, impacted user, tool integrated, and so on), we recommend a cost-benefit analysis to ensure the tool delivers sufficient ROI and that it won’t create an unexpected cost burden over time. 

We recommend reviewing the roadmaps of shortlisted products prior to making a final decision. An area of increasing focus for the future is (potentially AI/ML-driven) opinionated guidance, and though several vendors have this capability already, most have it in their plans to drive broader and deeper insights and what-if analysis for process changes.

It is important to see VSM within a program of strategic change, using the tactical shorter-term benefits of any solution as a sweetener to longer-term adoption of better working practices. If solving for complexity is the goal, organizations can’t afford to bring in yet another management platform in isolation from their greater goals. 

Ultimately, organizations must understand what problems they are facing with software delivery and what they are prepared to do to fix them. This information is key to determining whether the response is strategic or tactical and should seek long-term or short-term gains. Decision-makers should consider which value stream management tools align with their own roadmap and/or review the roadmap in the light of what the various tooling offers. 

To learn about related topics in this space, check out the following GigaOm Radar reports:

• GigaOm Key Criteria for Evaluating Value Stream Management (VSM) Solutions

• GigaOm Radar for Value Stream Management (VSM)

For more information about our research process for Key Criteria and Radar reports, please visit our Methodology.

Dana Hernandez is a dynamic, accomplished technology leader focused on the application of technology to business strategy and function. Over the last three decades, she had extensive experience with design and implementation of IT solutions in the areas of Finance, Sales, Marketing, Social Platforms, Revenue Management, Accounting, and all aspects of Airline Cargo, including Warehouse Operations. Most recently, she spearheaded technical teams responsible for implementing and supporting all applications for Global Sales for a major airline, owning the technical and business relationship to help drive strategy to meet business needs.

She has led numerous large, complex transformation efforts, including key system merger efforts consolidating companies onto one platform to benefit both companies, and she's modernized multiple systems onto large ERP platforms to reduce costs, enhance sustainability, and provide more modern functionality to end users.

Throughout her career, Dana leveraged strong analytical and planning skills, combined with the ability to influence others with the common goal of meeting organizational and business objectives. She focused on being a leader in vendor relationships, contract negotiation and management, and resource optimization.

She is also a champion of agile, leading agile transformation efforts across many diverse organizations. This includes heading up major organizational transformations to product taxonomy to better align business with enterprise technology. She is energized by driving organizational culture shifts that include adopting new mindsets and delivery methodologies.

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