Client stories
Specific feedback from audits, instrumentation reviews, and briefings—not star widgets.
“They caught that our ‘high adoption’ CI template was mostly wrapper jobs. The brief made the consolidation vote less political—even if it meant we kept a tool I personally disliked.”
“The instrumentation review was blunt about our sampling. We had been celebrating green-build curves while cancel events were throttled. Fixing that took two sprints; arguing about it beforehand had taken six months.”
“I wished the interviews had included more night-shift contractors—we only heard from core hours. Still, the plugin cohort framing stopped us from funding a rewrite based on launch-week curiosity alone.”
“The half-day briefing gave our managers a shared vocabulary for ‘meaningful action’ versus seat count. We still argue, but about thresholds we wrote down together.”
Extended story: retiring a duplicate issue tracker
A multi-product organization in Korea ran two issue systems after an acquisition. Seat counts suggested both were “essential.” DevTools Connect ran a Tool Consolidation Advisory with a light usage audit slice: interviews across both former companies, plus thirty-day active definitions that ignored pure login events.
Findings showed one tracker carried review-linked workflows and release checklists; the other held mostly archival tickets and a bot that posted status nobody read. The recommendation memo kept the first, scheduled a read-only archive for the second, and listed three squads who needed temporary dual access during migration.
Constraint that mattered: privacy counsel limited raw ticket titles in exports. We worked from event types and interview notes instead of scraping descriptions. The budget vote passed on the first attempt after previous attempts had stalled on vendor slide decks.