Velocity by CodeClimate

Published Thursday, July 26, 2018

Guest speakers: Noah Davis and Fred Creech from Code Climate

Intro

Note: This product is changing rapidly.

Gives us insight into entire team or drill down into squads.

Primarily built for engineering managers.

What This Tool Is

  • Data viz that can inform team’s decisions, processes, etc.
  • Insights into trends, changes over time
  • Identify and monitor risks

What This Tool is Not

  • Stack ranking for engineers
  • Laws for good/bad practices

Product Tour

Note: All metrics are “tuneable”. Can be customized based on team processes/preferences.

Definitions

PR Throughput: Merged PRs

Code Cycle: Time from first commit to merge When we get to continuous delivery, then code cycle is commit to ship. But we’re not there yet.

Time to Open: Time from first commit to opening PR. Note: one of the most important drivers of cycle time

Coding days: Any day when an engineer makes a commit. Note: Can exclude any contributor from reports

Review cycles: Measures back and forth between reviewers and authors (aka time between comments and commits)

Main Dashboard

Main dashboard highlights improvements + areas for improvement.

Things we’re doing well

  • ex. PR size
  • ex. Time to Open

Things we can improve on

  • ex. Weekly Coding Days
  • ex. Review Cycles

Metrics

Capacity

  • Team size
  • Coding days

Drivers

Things you can pull a lever on and drive activity. Find areas where we can improve.

Pushes per day
  • Helps visualize feelings of productivity (or lack thereof)
  • Puts data behind feelings or stuff discussed in 1:1s
Code Review
  • Unreviewed PRs
  • Time to Review
  • Review Cycles
Efficiency
  • Rework
  • Abandoned PRs

Outcomes

Changes in above metrics over time.

Option to add markers for events, holidays. Clarify events that might impact productivity.

Resources:

  1. Velocity