The software project management platform for agile software teams, Zenhub, has announced a raft of AI-powered facilities that will serve as a co-pilot to help reduce manual updates and improve productivity.  

Zenhub is an agile project management tool that is natively integrated into GitHub. It is used by more than 8,000 software teams across the world,  including Red Hat, Adobe, and NASA, for real-time roadmap visibility and team productivity insights.

Zenbub's approach to reaping the benefits of AI focuses on the team rather than the individual and the AI-powered features it is incorporating in its platform will assist in all the ancillary activities to writing code, such as managing projects and tasks,  categorizing and prioritizing work, and other productivity-related activities. So rather than help write and debug code, the role of GitHub's Copilot, Zenhub AI aims to simplify the day-to-day  processes and operational overhead involved in software project management, which can often get in the  way of shipping code faster.

Another difference is that Zenhub wants to involve interested parties in the evolution of new AI-powered capabilities. According to Tyler Gaffney, Zenhub’s CEO:

“Our approach to building AI is different from most  vendors today as we are building in ‘public’ with complete transparency. Our objective is to thoughtfully  build AI for real-life use cases by actively collaborating with our end users and customers. Hence, we’ve  also announced our early access group, where participants work with the product team directly in shaping  how Zenhub AI works."

Today's announcement provides details of planned AI-enabled features being incorporated into the Zenhub platform AI Labels  the first one of which, used at project inception, is available in public beta today:

As soon as a team member begins  entering data into Zenhub, the system suggests potential labels for the information. Since  labels power reporting, analytics, and more across the development ecosystem,  this innovative feature reduces cognitive load and saves developers time while ensuring  accuracy across the team’s development process.

Other AI-enabled platform features that are coming soon are relevant to specific parts of project development: 

Planning

• AI Estimations - Intended to gives developer teams insight into how  challenging a particular project may be, helping them to agree on what’s easy and  challenging, as well as what resources will be needed to complete the assignment.

Claimed to be an "industry-first feature" it will have:

the ability to surface what work informed the "Zenhub estimate," which could also help  humans better estimate what will be required to get the job done. How prior work is  completed will influence future work estimations and ensure the team is on track.  

• AI Prioritization - To speed up backlog refinement this facility will use past behavior as a guide for prioritizing unfinished tasks. Zenhub AI will then suggest  optimal priorities for new tasks, efficiently categorizing them as high, medium, or low priority. This dynamic system is intended to ensure that high-priority work is prominently placed at the  top of your backlog, streamlining issue prioritization and saving teams time during  backlog refinement. 

Stand-Ups 

• AI Daily Feed - This functionality will give individuals and teams insights into what  they’ve accomplished, what they need to do today, and what priorities are required in the  near term, giving the entire team a 360-degree view of what’s happening daily. Zenhub is  exploring using sentiment analysis within issues, user stories, and comments to understand and surface where team members might be blocked or stuck. 

Reviews 

• AI-Powered Sprint Demos - For reviewing work, Zenhub will employ AI to automatically  generate a summary of all work done by the team during a Sprint (or that week). This should makes it easy for the team lead to give updates on progress.

Retrospectives 

• AI Retros - This feature is all about providing AI-powered suggestions on how teams can  improve their processes by leveraging AI to determine what went well in recent sprints,  what issues were faced, and, most importantly, what the team can do to improve.  

All these seem to make excellent use of AI to positively impact the day-to-day activities of software teams. To learn more and get early access when these new features are ready you can apply here to join the  Zenhub AI early access group.   

More Information

Zenhub AI

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