Frequently Asked Questions about Teamscale Terms

Do we need a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) as well?

Our Subscription Agreement, which is the foundation of every Teamscale contract, already contains a confidentiality clause. This also protects any source code that you upload into Teamscale. If your company still requires an NDA, please reach out to our sales team (sales@teamscale.com) to arrange the required signatures.

What if I need all those documents signed?

From our perspective, those terms are in place as part of the licensing contract for Teamscale. However, if your company required signed copies of those terms, please reach out to our sales team (sales@teamscale.com) to arrange the required signatures.

Can I get assistance for getting approval for Teamscale by a Workers' Council (German: "Betriebsrat" or "Personalrat")?

As Teamscale has information about employees and their work results, e.g. findings, some companies might require an additional agreement ("Betriebsvereinbarung") when using Teamscale. As those agreements are company internal documents, CQSE will usually not be a signing party, but we helped with many of those discussions in the past. Typically, the workers' council's concern is that Teamscale could be used to assess the work of individual workers. Arguments that we found helpful in the discussion with workers' councils include:

• We strongly advocate against using quality metrics to assess people as we ourselves found that this does not work, as this does not take other factors into account, such as complexity of the task at hand.
• We only aggregate information that is already present in other tools, like the version control system, i.e. if someone wants to do this, it can be also done without Teamscale.
• Developers and testers significantly benefit from such information in their daily work and even welcome having such information exposed in Teamscale.

In most cases, it is sufficient to have an agreement that states that information from Teamscale will never be used to assess individual workers. If this is not sufficient, there is an option (Admin > Settings > Data Privacy Settings) that limits the data shown to developers to only their own commits. While activating this feature will reduce the usefulness of Teamscale to the development team, it can help to convince a workers' council.