Release notes

In May, our product underwent significant transformation, enhancing usability and opening the door for even more streamlined data-driven decision making for your software organization.

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Highlights

• By the numbers - Team delivered 30 enhancements and fixed 50 important bugs.  
• Time to Insight - Reduce time to insight with charting and data analysis powered by Gen AI.
• Navigation Improvements - New sidebar menu reduces clicks by up to 80%, making it easier to find what you need.
• Spaces - Organize work into themes, reducing cognitive load and personalizing the data management experience to fit your needs.

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Improvements

• User Management: Support for advanced merging, unmerging, and ordering of users for more flexible management.
• Charting: Numerous improvements to increase readability and flexibility.]some text
  • 100% bar chart visualization.
  • Comparisons with previous period across all charts for more context.
  • Long legend support.
  • Sorting on measures and column formulas.
• Natural Language Query Builder:some text
  • Improved translation support for boolean logic, conditionals, and between operators.
  • Enhanced performance and reliability for converting questions to queries.
• Query Engine:some text
  • Support for 'HAVING' clause, allowing filters on measures and formulas in queries. Useful for adding monitors with thresholds.
• Integrations:some text
  • Support for Snyk, GitLab, Outlook, Teams, and Bitbucket.
• Library:some text
  • Combines all your assets (queries, boards, entities) into a single library.
  • Allows you to favorite, organize, search, and filter to find everything you need with just a few clicks.

Spaces

With Spaces, users can organize questions, boards, and entities into themed groups. This not only streamlines data management but also reduces friction when completing tasks. For example, if you're preparing your monthly report, you can gather all your reports in one place. The same goes for process improvements, project management, or team management.

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Update Navigation

The updated navigation reduces clicks by up to 80%, making it much easier to find what you're looking for. You can now access most of what you need directly from the primary navigation. We've also improved data grouping and allowed for Spaces to be pinned to the navigation for quick access.

Looking ahead, we have exciting improvements coming to search and tabs, which will further enhance your experience. Stay tuned for those updates!

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Gen AI

With the help of AI, we provide time-saving access to analysis and insights for your data. You can access these on charts and data lists. The "Explain" feature helps you understand how to use the data, while "Insights" gives you a nudge into what the data is telling you.

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May 1st, 2024

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In April, the team delivered over 50 enhancements and a few dozen important bug fixes.  It was an exciting month indeed. We couldn’t have achieved it without the wonderful support and feedback from our users.  Thank you!

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New Features:

• Enhanced Analytics Tools: Dive deeper with our new PullRequestReview entity page and improved issue enrichment features to help you get more insights from your data.
• Redesigned the Entity Detail page, adding metrics, history, and entity insights. 
• Improved entity contextual awareness. Added explanations to every context card.
• Add the ability to build and manage teams as a first tier entity for discovery and analytics. 
• Expand data enrichments on core entities like: issues, comments, channels, initiatives, releases, and more. Enabling deeper insights and contextual awareness.  
• Process Metrics: expand time in status for workflow entities like PRs and Issues.

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Fixed Bugs Include:

• Improved data analysis: Tackled a few dozen data issues impacting reliable data transformation, product analysis, and query building.  
• Improved Data Visualization: Robust handling of null, zero, and malformed data outliers. 
• Sorting and Filtering Improvements: Several fixes have been implemented to enhance the sorting and filtering time, dates, and string values.

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What’s Next?

We have exciting plans across usability, utility, and time to value.  Improvements include:

• More simple and literal navigation, discovery, and drill-down controls. 
• Simplify question and board organization for easier workflow management. 
• Improve query builder autocompletion to reduce clicks by 80%. 
• Numerous query builder enhancements to provide more fine tune controls to find that signal in your data. 
• Many more quality improvements. 

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Your input is crucial for us! Keep sending your feedback and watch out for more updates that make VZBL even better.

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March was a significant leap forward for the product and our users. We unlocked deeper time based analysis, improved charting capabilities, and improved UX. Improving overall visibility, insights, and reporting.  

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Enhancements:

• Weekly Digest: Introducing the weekly digest feature, providing insights to drive learnings and discover different trends that can explain how the team is working. Stay informed about key trends and developments with ease.
• Reader Time Measurement: Introducing reader time to measure the amount of time individuals spend staying caught up with team communications. Now you can track engagement and assess communication effectiveness more accurately.
• Global Dashboard Filters: We've added global filters to dashboards, enabling easy filter mappings by entity to chart intent. This allows for complex filtering across the entire SDLC, accommodating different meanings of a single entity. An example of this is filtering on people, but looking at people assigned in one state, and people committing code on another. 
• Enhanced Filtering Options: Now you can filter on time between properties, such as finding all commits created last year but updated this week. Additionally, you can select a unit to filter on, such as minutes, hours, weeks, and more, providing greater flexibility and precision in data analysis.
• Compare with previous period: Analysis requires context. By selecting compare with a a previous period, you can see how work is changing in blocks of time.
• Charting Enhancements: This release includes numerous UX enhancements to reduce friction, including better charting interactivity and drill-down capabilities. We've improved charting visualization controls, including axis, tooltips, and value on hovers, for a smoother user experience.
• Entity History: Added entity history feature to see what changed between states, enabling better tracking and auditing of data changes.
• Improved Natural Language Search: Upgraded natural language search to a query engine, enhancing the reliability of search results while considering the intent of the search. Now you can find relevant information more efficiently.
• UX Enhancements - Too many to list. The overall theme is to improve first day usability.  Adding a cleaner landing page, more natural navigation controls, better auto-complete feedback, improve list views, and eliminated many dead click areas.  

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed a variety of data bugs to ensure data accuracy and reliability.

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It's been a whirlwind of activity here, and after focusing on some major updates over the last few months, we took a moment to zoom in on the finer details of user experience polish. This latest release is all about enhancing usability and ironing out those smaller, yet impactful, issues that refine your interaction with our platform.

Key improvements you'll notice center on dashboard functionality. We've upgraded the data picker for more intuitive navigation, enhanced snippet controls for better command, and smoothed out the visualization experience to bring clarity to your data at a glance. To further enrich your dashboard interaction, we've introduced a number of standard dashboards, fine-tuned our augmented analytics calculations, and added augmented explanations, offering insights into the 'why' behind calculated values.

But that's not all. We're in the process of revamping our landing page to make your entry into VZBL more welcoming and refined the card editing experience to make question building more straightforward.

Alongside these, there are over 50 additional improvements and fixes. We're excited for you to dive in and enjoy the smoother, more intuitive journey through your data insights with these updates.

We're thrilled to introduce our enhanced ontology model – think of it as Ontology Model 2.0! Previously, our model allowed you to ask questions across any connected entities in the graph, like PRs related to issues or meetings tied to an initiative. You could explore events on an issue or releases, but now, we're taking a giant leap forward.

With Ontology Model 2.0, you can delve into questions about events on one entity that are related to another, even if they're not directly connected. Why is this a game-changer? Imagine wanting to track all releases from the CI/CD pipeline that are related to a specific issue.

Previously, these connections, woven through PRs or commits, weren't directly queryable at the issue level. Now, you can easily link these disparate elements, offering insights into the time and effort funneling into a release or the ripple effects of an incident on broader initiatives.

Before, piecing together these relationships required manual effort and deep organizational knowledge. Today, our updated model bridges these gaps automatically, bringing you closer to a fully transparent operational landscape.

The possibilities this new model opens up are immense, and we're just scratching the surface of its potential applications. Dive in and start exploring – we're eager to see the discoveries we'll make together, pushing the boundaries of visibility and insight.

We heard you loud and clear! While our query builder packed a punch with its robust capabilities, we realized it posed some usability challenges. Finding all commits without an issue, calculating issue cycle time by PR risk, or determining average focus time by sprint – while powerful, navigating these complex relationships wasn't always intuitive.

We're excited to unveil our revamped query builder, designed with clarity and ease of use in mind. Now, you can visually identify 'askable' paths, making it simpler to construct and navigate your queries. We've also enhanced search functionality within long data lists, ensuring you can find what you need without the hassle.

For our power users, the query builder is more keyboard-friendly, streamlining your workflow and setting the stage for even more sophisticated queries and formulae in the future. Plus, we've ironed out those pesky edge cases, ensuring your queries yield not just accurate, but also expected, results.

At its core, VZBL revolves around 'questions' – your tool to unlock the vast potential of your data. We're thrilled to enhance this essential feature, making it easier than ever to dive into your data and find those crucial insights. Here's to making your quest for answers more intuitive and fruitful than ever!

While November might have seemed quiet on the surface, the VZBL team has been anything but idle. We've been hard at work, taking in your feedback and enhancing our platform to help you uncover even deeper insights.

In this release, we're excited to introduce: augmented analytics. This new capability takes your data analysis to the next level. Augmented analytics automatically classifies your data, activities, and entities, providing a much-needed layer of clarity and trustworthiness to your insights. We understand that data isn't always as clean as we'd like. Now, you can confidently differentiate between enhancements and defects, identify whether a commit is a refactor or a new feature, or even discern if a Slack message is sarcastic or informative. With proper classification you can better trust your analysis, patterns, and outliers.

But we didn't stop there. Along with data classification, we've introduced classification scores, enabling you to track and report on emerging trends. Whether you're monitoring issue friction, identifying PR blockers, or assessing code risk, these scores offer a new lens to view your data, focusing not just on the entities but on their behaviors and interactions. With scores, you can look for all commits with a complexity greater than 5, or all issues with a readiness < 3. With these scores you can decide if this is something that warrants your attention or not.  At the end of the day, we are not trying to measure or judge you, we want to give you data, and enable you to decide for yourself.

Augmented analytics is all about empowering you to sift through your data's noise, spotlighting the signals that matter. It's about making your vast data pools more navigable, ensuring you can quickly and efficiently extract actionable insights.

With VZBL's augmented analytics, you're not just observing data; you're engaging with it, uncovering the stories and trends that drive your team's performance and efficiency. Get ready to explore your data like never before!

VZBL is delighted to introduce a feature many of you have been eagerly awaiting: dashboards.

We've seen how powerful and versatile our questioning feature has become, with our early adopters saving hundreds of questions to tailor their insights. While the flexibility of individual questions is incredible, we also recognize the power of seeing your data narratives unfold in a single, comprehensive view. That's where dashboards come in.

With our new dashboard feature, you can create your own data storyboards. Imagine dragging and dropping your saved questions onto a canvas, resizing and arranging them to craft the narrative you need. Whether you're preparing an executive report or setting up a dashboard for your next one-on-one, the customization is in your hands.

Dashboards bring your data to life, allowing you to combine different insights into a cohesive story. And don't worry; you still have all the drill-down and pivot functionalities to dive deep into the raw data whenever you need to, just a few clicks away.

We're excited to see the stories you'll tell and the insights you'll uncover with your new dashboards. Here's to making your data speak louder and clearer than ever with VZBL!

Exciting news! A huge thank you to our early adopters for your invaluable feedback. Because of your insights, we're thrilled to introduce a significantly enhanced VZBL experience, along with a fresh suite of features.

Now, VZBL isn't just about monitoring or a real-time feed. You've got the power to analyze, and probe deeper, asking targeted questions about your data. Want to check the status of specific issues or assess the health of a branch? You can do that effortlessly. With the ability to pivot and filter using over 100 attributes across your software development life cycle (SDLC), your data is more accessible and actionable than ever.

But that's not all. With our new questioning capability, you can aggregate data and perform nuanced analyses. Imagine pinpointing all issues opened last week that saw no action this week, or identifying pull requests merged without adequate reviews. These insights are now at your fingertips.

And we're just getting started. Our vision is to interlink the entire SDLC, enabling you to uncover connections like issues blocked by PRs. Stay tuned for more integrations and capabilities designed to empower your team.

Here's to continued growth and deeper insights with VZBL!

Big news! After six months of dedicated effort, we're thrilled to announce the launch of VZBL beta! We've been working hard to get this initial version out to you, and it's packed with features that we think you'll love.

VZBL beta brings you a real-time feed of your operational data, pulling together information from your favorite tools: Jira, GitHub, Google Calendar, Circle CI, and Slack. With this, you get a dynamic feed that you can filter and sort with ease, helping you focus on what matters most to you.

Need to keep an eye on high-risk issues or track commits by a specific rep? No problem. VZBL allows you to save custom views for these exact scenarios. Plus, with the power of AI, VZBL summarizes your activity feeds, giving you the insights you need without the hassle.

And there's more: with our unified search feature, you can now search across all your integrated systems from one place, making it easier than ever to find the information you need.

We're excited for you to try VZBL beta and see how it transforms your operational visibility. Here's to making your workday more informed and less cluttered!