If you're looking for a way to spot engineering problems before they escalate, work log heatmaps provide instant visual insight into team health, blockers, and activity patterns.
GitHub's contribution graph—that grid of green squares on your profile—is one of the most effective visualizations in developer tooling. At a glance, you can see activity patterns, gaps, and consistency.
Velocinator takes this concept further with Work Log Heatmaps: visual representations of engineering activity across issues, engineers, and teams.
What a Heatmap Shows
A Work Log Heatmap maps activity (commits, PR events, Jira transitions) to time. The axes vary by view:
By Issue
Rows are Jira issues. Columns are days. Cells are colored by activity intensity. You can immediately see:
- Which issues are actively being worked
- Which issues have stalled (no recent activity)
- Which issues had a burst of activity then went quiet
By Engineer
Rows are team members. Columns are days. This reveals:
- Who's heads-down vs. who's spread thin
- Vacation and out-of-office patterns
- Uneven workload distribution
By Team
Rows are teams. Columns are days. Useful for:
- Comparing team activity levels
- Identifying teams under strain
- Spotting cross-team coordination patterns
Patterns to Watch For
The Scattered Pattern
An engineer's heatmap shows activity jumping between 8 different issues in a single day, with no sustained focus on any of them.
What it might mean: Excessive context switching. The developer is being pulled in too many directions. This is a recipe for burnout and slow progress on everything.
Action: Review their workload. Are they on too many projects? Are they the only person who can answer certain questions? Consider shielding them from interruptions.
The Cliff
An issue's heatmap shows intense activity for a week, then nothing.
What it might mean: The developer got blocked, deprioritized the work, or abandoned a failing approach.
Action: Check in on the issue status. If it's still "In Progress" but has been quiet for a week, something's wrong.
The Desert
A team's heatmap shows very little activity across a multi-day period, but it's not a holiday.
What it might mean: The team is stuck—perhaps waiting on external dependencies, caught in planning paralysis, or dealing with incidents that don't show up as code changes.
Action: Investigate. Sometimes the lack of code activity is the most important signal.
The Spike
An engineer's heatmap shows normal activity most days, but one day is extremely intense—10x the usual.
What it might mean: A deadline crunch, an incident response, or maybe they finally unblocked themselves after days of struggling. Could also indicate working unhealthy hours.
Action: Understand the cause. If it's crunch culture, address the root cause. If it's self-inflicted (procrastination then panic), coach on better work habits.
The Even Spread
A team's heatmap shows consistent, moderate activity across all members and all days.
What it might mean: Healthy, sustainable pace. Workload is balanced. No one is overwhelmed or idle.
Action: Celebrate and maintain it.
Weekly vs. Monthly Views
Heatmaps at different timescales reveal different insights.
Weekly View
Best for operational awareness:
- Who's working on what right now?
- Are the current sprint's issues progressing?
- Is anyone stuck this week?
Monthly View
Best for trend analysis:
- How does this month compare to last month?
- Are there patterns in when activity dips (end of sprint, after releases)?
- Is the team's overall velocity improving?
Integrating with Jira Data
Heatmaps become more powerful when combined with Jira context.
Stuck Story Detection: An issue in "In Progress" status for 5 days with no GitHub activity is automatically flagged. The heatmap shows this as a gray row (no commits) while the Jira status says active work.
Sprint Health: Overlay sprint boundaries on the heatmap. You can see if work is evenly distributed through the sprint or crammed into the last few days.
Story Point Correlation: Are high-point stories showing proportionally more activity? If a 13-point story has less activity than a 3-point story, something might be miscalibrated.
Making Heatmaps Actionable
A heatmap is a diagnostic tool, not a report card. Here's how to use it effectively:
Daily Standups
Pull up the team heatmap at standup. "I see PROJ-123 has been quiet for three days—Alex, what's the status?" It focuses the conversation on what matters.
1:1s
Review an engineer's personal heatmap together. "I notice you've been spread across five repos this month. Is that intentional? How are you feeling about it?"
Retrospectives
Show the team heatmap for the past sprint. "We had a cluster of intense activity in the last two days—that was the deadline crunch. How can we spread work more evenly next time?"
Capacity Planning
When leadership asks why the team can't take on more work, show the heatmap. The visual evidence of already-full plates is more compelling than words.
Start Visualizing
Connect Velocinator to your GitHub and Jira, and Work Log Heatmaps populate automatically. No configuration required.
Sometimes, seeing the shape of work is enough to know what to fix.
Frequently Asked Questions
- What are work log heatmaps?
- Work log heatmaps are visual representations of engineering activity across issues, engineers, and teams. Like GitHub's contribution graph but for your entire engineering workflow, they reveal patterns like blockers, context switching, and team health at a glance.
- How do heatmaps help engineering managers?
- Heatmaps surface problems visually that would take hours to discover in spreadsheets: developers with no activity (potential blockers), scattered work patterns (too much context switching), and team-level gaps that indicate systemic issues.
