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Cycle Time Breakdown: Reducing PR Review Time

The Issue

As a manager of a software development team, you are always under pressure to deliver value to the customer.  In order to do that more effectively, you monitor your Cycle Time and work to keep it as low as possible so that features get into production as quickly as possible.  

One of the issues that can be a bump in the road towards meeting that goal is Review Time. Review Time is defined as the time between the first comment on your code and the time it is merged back into the main branch.  It’s the third phase of Cycle Time and keeping it inside proper boundaries is critical to keeping quality code moving through the pipeline.

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WorkerB Developer Automation From LinearB

“The most powerful tool we have as developers is automation.”
—Scott Hanselman

Developers automate everything about how we write, test and ship code. But when it comes to the process of how we work together as a team on projects, it’s highly manual.  

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How To Use DORA Engineering Metrics To Improve Your Dev Team

Objective data to measure software development is here, and it’s here to stay.

For a long time, the notion of using such data was thought to not really be possible. Thought leaders like Martin Fowler and Joel Spolsky basically said it couldn’t be done. Clearly, it’s a challenging task that frustrated software development managers everywhere. Shoot, I wrote an article way back when basically arguing that it is impossible to do.

Well, I’d continue to argue that it was impossible to do. But now, with the rise of tooling like git, Jira, and other project management tools, it started becoming clear that the data is there to enable us to get a closer, more data-driven look at what is going on inside software development projects. That data just had to be revealed.

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Engineering Metrics: 3 Levels Of Visibility

Introduction

LinearB has all sorts of engineering metrics for your software development pipeline.  We can slice and dice those metrics from all kinds of angles and all sorts of ways. Your CTO will want to see very different views of LinearB data than will your developer leads. Whether you are trying to see into the health of your delivery pipeline, seeking out bottlenecks in your system, or worried about making sure only LinearB can help you gain those insights.

Since the presentation of data is critical to its effectiveness, LinearB allows you to create views into your data for different levels of your organization and your code.  The three most interesting views into your data are:

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Measuring Developers Isn’t Tyranny

Informing someone that you want to “measure” them is not a great way to start a conversation. Software developers, like all people, tend to look unfavorably upon having their performance closely measured. But measuring developers is one of the hottest trends for companies around the globe. So is it tyranny to measure people?

People are quick to note that numbers don’t tell the whole story and can become defensive at the notion their productivity should be quantified somehow. This resistance can become even more entrenched when teams become stacked against each other. 

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9 Things I’ve Learned About Software Development Management

Managing the software development process has been likened to herding cats. In other words, you can’t really do it, but you can sure give it the old college try. 

It’s no secret that managing the development of a software project is an imprecise science. Here are nine truisms that I’ve learned over the years that have helped me to understand the limitations of our ability to manage the strange world of software development projects.

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Those “Pesky” Pull Requests are Totally Worth It

Pretty much everyone does code reviews. They’ve been around a long time. I remember back in my Borland days when the Chief Scientist would come in every morning and review all the code that had been checked into the Subversion(!) repository the previous day and send emails out to folks whose code wasn’t up to snuff. That’s old school.

Slightly less old school? Saving all the check-ins up until Friday for the Dev Leads and/or Dev Managers to review and approve. Both of these techniques leave a lot to be desired -- the main thing being a complete lack of interaction between the developer, the code, and the reviewer. 

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Eight Questions I Had Every Day As A Dev Team Lead

When I was a software developer manager, there were a lot of questions.  Questions that my boss asked me.  Questions that I had myself.  Questions that arose when discussing work with my team. And most of these were questions to which I did not have a good answer.  I couldn’t respond well to them because I didn’t have the data necessary to give a definitive answer.  

The data was there, but without a way to get at it, I often felt like I was stumbling in the dark. But all is not lost.  Here are eight questions that I had, and ways that data inside your tools can be used to answer them.