Developer onboarding in action

You've prepared your Cortex workspace for onboarding new developers. Now, when hiring new engineers, you can reduce manual effort and speed time-to-productivity.

Learn more below on how you can streamline onboarding for developers and their managers in Cortex.

Onboarding for the new developer

Review, prioritize, and complete tasks

New developers can log in to Cortex and instantly see their work to be done.

Prioritize and complete work from the homepage

Engineers use the Engineering homepage as their personalized daily starting point. It provides a centralized view of work to be done, including:

• Active work: See your open PRs, PRs assigned for review, active Jira tickets, and action items from Scorecards and Initiatives, ensuring you are aware of your responsibilities.

• On-call status: See current and upcoming on-call shifts, helping you stay prepared for incident response.

• Scorecards and Initiatives: See real-time progress toward organization standards.

• Shortcuts: Use direct links to quickly access your owned entities.

Automate onboarding tasks

When a new developer starts, they can run Workflows to automate common processes. For example:

• Onboarding environment setup

• Provisioning user access

When developers need to spin up a new service, they can use Scaffolder Workflows that already have your best practices baked in.

• See an example: Scaffold a new service with custom data based on user input.

Leadership actions for onboarding new developers

Use Onboarding Management to check onboarding status

Leaders can use the Onboarding Management tool to track onboarding status and nudge developers:

• Monitor progress: View teams, see how many members have onboarded, and use the progress bar to gauge organization-wide activation.

• Identify blockers: Find users who aren't connected to critical tools, like Slack or Microsoft Teams, and map their identities so they can receive notifications from Cortex.

• Remind at scale: Send reminders to users or teams via Slack or Microsoft Teams, asking them to complete onboarding.

Review failing Scorecard rules

Review onboarding-related Scorecard rules

If you have a Scorecard in progress that examines engineering team productivity, it can give you insight into how the newer developers and their teams are doing.

Review failing rules

When a Scorecard rule is failing, this information is surfaced to you in multiple ways:

• Scorecard rules that require your attention appear on the Engineering homepage.

• You can receive notifications via Slack, Microsoft Teams, or email when a Scorecard rule is failing.

  • Learn more about configuring notifications in the docs.

• You can review a Scorecard's progress in reports or by viewing the Scorecard in Cortex.

Remediate failing rules

When a team or service falls short of standards, there are different ways you can approach remediation:

• You can identify and troubleshoot trends in Scorecards, and consider scalable remediation efforts. Learn more in Review and evaluate Scorecards.

• You can set up an Initiative to assign and track remediation tasks. For example, if you have an Eng Intelligence Scorecard, you might notice a new developer's team no longer passing the rule "Deployment frequency > 3/week." To motivate the team to deploy more frequently, you could create an Initiative that asks them to reach the benchmark within the next month. During that time, managers can coach the new developer and the team can work together to figure out what is slowing their process down.

  • You can also automatically create issues in Jira, ClickUp, Azure DevOps, and GitHub based on Initiatives. After creating an issue config, Cortex will automatically create a parent issue for each entity with failing rules, and each failing rule will be created as a subtask. Learn more in Creating issues based on Initiatives.

Analyze trends and act on Eng Intelligence metrics

Eng Intelligence allows you to view organization-wide and historical data, making it easy for leaders to validate the impact of onboarding programs and for teams to see their progress toward goals.

View metrics and take action

View Eng Intelligence metrics to see how your new developers and their teams are doing, then take action to promote continuous improvement.

Identify trends

Track metrics like review latency, cycle time, and PR throughput to spot bottlenecks in the software development process.

Review Jira metrics to better understand engagement for new engineers and effectiveness of onboarding processes:

• Story points completed: This metric can show early engagement and productivity. If new hires are consistently delivering story points by their second sprint, onboarding is working.

• Work item lead time: If new hires are decreasing their lead time, it demonstrates that onboarding effectively reduces friction.

• Work items completed: Higher completion count over the first few sprints can signal increasing confidence.

• Work items created: Comparing created with completed can highlight whether teams are scoping onboarding tasks realistically, or whether they might be overwhelming new engineers.

Take action

Metric trends give you insight into issues. For example, maybe processes aren't clearly documented, or maybe new hires are waiting on reviews. With these insights, you gain opportunities to coach reviewers or refine templates and process guides.

Connect insights to outcomes by creating a targeted Initiative to drive improvements.

• Initiatives send notifications to users asking them to complete tasks by the deadline you configured. Learn more in Initiatives and Action items.