“It’s spring fever. That is what the name of it is. And when you’ve got it, you want—oh, you don’t quite know what it is you do want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so!”
– Mark Twain
No offense to Mr. Twain, but our customers know what they want–and we included a lot of it in the Spring Launch of LinearB! This package of new features, enhancements, and improved functionality is all about helping engineering teams–and those leading them–fulfill their their dual mandate:
- Delivering operational excellence
- Driving positive outcomes for the business
It’s no longer enough for engineering teams to be solely concerned with delivering features fast with high quality–though don’t get us wrong, that should still be a chief concern. But the perception of engineering is changing (rightly so) from cost center to business driver. And with that change in perception comes new considerations for engineering leaders:
- How to get a sense of engineering health that goes beyond velocity
- How to maintain operational excellence and provide a great developer experience
- How to align engineering projects to business priorities, control costs, and enable other teams to succeed
Improvement for engineering teams and meeting the dual mandate comes down to three key disciplines:
- Gaining visibility into impact metrics and benchmarking team performance
- Building programmable workflows that leverage automation and PR-policy-as-code
- Maintaining fiscal discipline and business alignment with resource allocation visibility
And that’s exactly how LinearB was designed!
In addition to helping customers with both sides of engineering’s core responsibilities, the Spring Launch of LinearB is focused on helping teams mature, scale for the future, and align to enterprise best practices.
Let’s dive into what’s included in the Spring Launch of LinearB!
Impact Metrics, Benchmarking, and Enterprise Scale
This is the foundation that operational excellence is built on–gaining visibility into engineering performance metrics and using this insight to set data-backed OKRs that drive improvement.
The enhancements to LinearB in this category are all about:
- Aligning to enterprise best practices
- Providing more flexibility
- Maturing as a team
- Driving the business forward
New Reporting Structure: Team Grouping
This new feature enables you to build reporting and metrics programs that are more flexible, customizable and better reflect your organization’s structure. As your engineering organization scales up, you’re sure to have projects or initiatives that span multiple teams. Groups are also great for getting abstracted/aggregated benchmarks on how well teams collaborate on priority projects–using tried and true engineering metrics like cycle time and PR size.
Please note that this feature is currently in beta–please work with LinearB support for issues with access or to provide your extremely valuable feedback.
On-Premises Kubernetes Deployments
If you’re like nearly half of all orgs operating containers, you’re running them with Kubernetes. To support the teams that prefer running container-based apps with Kubernetes AND want to keep their data on-prem (like those in compliance-heavy industries), LinearB can now provide engineering metrics you need for on-prem Kubernetes container workloads.
Please note that this feature is currently in beta–please work with LinearB support for issues with access or to provide your extremely valuable feedback.
Flexible Incident API
“You get DORA Metrics, and you get DORA metrics, and you get DORA metrics!!!”
– Oprah (if she worked in engineering)
LinearB is all about aligning to how you work which means we don’t want to limit which tools you use. That’s why we designed the tool to use the power of REST APIs to populate data and provide your team’s stability DORA metrics (MTTR and CFR) right out of the box–regardless of the PM tool you choose to use. In addition to opening LinearB up to teams with unsupported (at this time) PM tools, the incident API will help ensure data accuracy, a notorious shortcoming for many PM boards.
Please note that this feature is currently in beta–please work with LinearB support for issues with access or to provide your extremely valuable feedback.
Check it out
Azure SSO
Enterprise and Microsoft are nearly synonymous. Good thing we love Microsoft!! With this new enhancement LinearB better supports organizations who have invested in the Microsoft ecosystem–namely Azure and Azure DevOps–with the ability to use your organization’s Azure Active Directory ID to set up SAML SSO. In addition to making login faster and easier, this new functionality makes LinearB more secure and helps teams working in industries that have stringent compliance requirements (like SOC2). Please note that setting up Azure SSO requires both Azure AD Admin privileges and LinearB Admin privileges.
Up next: new features that make it easy to scale programmable workflows, enhance the developer experience, and increase efficiency for your organization.
Programmable Workflows and PR-Policy-As-Code
Teams that build a culture of continuous merge save time, reduce headaches, and become more productive. The key is removing friction (toil and idle time) from the dev process by automating workflows and providing as much context as possible before the PR process starts. gitStream (powered by LinearB) is how to build that continuous merge engine.
The Spring Launch of gitStream includes new integrations and enhancements that provide:
- Enterprise scale
- Improvements to security workflows
- Visibility into automation and efficiency gains
gitStream Dashboard
While still incredibly powerful, previous to this release gitStream was a data plane-only tool. That meant understanding what automations a team or repository had in place was a somewhat manual, piecemeal effort.
With the Spring Launch comes a major upgrade: an all new control plane UI that shows you what gitStream automations have been deployed across your repos or the organization as a whole!
This significant enhancement helps leaders visualize their organization’s use of automations, ensure alignment across teams, and drive org-wide standardization of how to handle PRs.
With standardization and repeatability built into your development workflows, growing teams can move faster and scale efficiency.
Please note that this feature is currently in open beta–so please work with LinearB support for issues with access or to provide your extremely valuable feedback.
Org-Level gitStream Rules
├─ *.cm
├─ .github/
│ └─ workflows/
│ └─ gitstream.yml
Once teams have a good process in place for a team or a repo–like 2 reviewers for risky PRs or auto approving things like simple docs changes–they should expand these best practices and efficiency gains to the whole organization. Now teams using gitStream with GitHub and GitLab can set org-level rules and automations to drive standardization. These organization-wide automation rules are defined by creating a special repository .cm in your organization or group.
GitStream for GitLab
You asked, we answered: Users can now apply gitStream automation to their GitLab merge requests, repositories, and the organization at large including:
- Auto approving small changes (like docs)
- Adding estimated review time labels to MRs
- Assigning code experts or reviewers by directory
- And so much more
gitStream for Sonar
automations:
# Add Bugs label
if:
- {{ sonar.bugs.count > 1 }}
run:
- action: add-label@v1
args:
label: "{{ sonar.bugs.count }} bugs"
color: {{ sonar.bugs.rating | mapToEnum(enum = colors) }}
SonarCloud’s automated Clean as you CodeTM methodology helps you find and fix bugs automatically, while LinearB and gitStream ensure you have visibility into the workflow and PRs get merged smoothly. With this integration teams get more context into the security posture of code with tags and labels to call out PRs with:
- Security vulnerabilities that need security engineers assigned as an extra reviewer
- Large percentages of code duplications or low coverage to maintain quality
- Successful SonarCloud checks in place so they can be auto-approved
- Low coverage in order to open tickets for additional testing and documentation
Next up: improvements to the Resource Allocation view that help with alignment and driving better outcomes for the business.
Resource Allocation and Business Alignment
The whole point of improving operational efficiency (with metrics programs and workflow automation) is to help drive the business forward.
LinearB provides engineering leaders with a unique look into where engineering is spending time and money that helps stakeholders across the business understand what these decisions mean for them. This Resource Allocation dashboard automatically configures initiatives, epics, and projects from your PM board and shows you:
- FTE effort by project
- Impact on delivery status
- What’s being prioritized and what isn’t
- Actual spend against engineering budget
The Spring Launch greatly improves Resource Allocation in LinearB
Full Time Effort Cost
This view in LinearB–available for customers on Enterprise subscriptions–shows engineering leaders what issues are being prioritized, how projects are resourced, and the estimated cost of those decisions. This view helps leaders:
- Control spending
- Mitigate delay risks
- Automate reporting on capitalizable projects for finance
- Build a connection between engineering output and ROI
Get started with Resource Allocation
Weekly Resource Allocation Report Email
Get the insights you need to prepare your talking points or make decisions for next week with a customized report on your key projects, initiatives, and resourcing decisions right to your inbox. This report ensures that you’re always up-to-date on how your high impact projects are trending and that you’re ready to confidently answer questions like “When will feature X be ready?” or “Can we prioritize this new initiative?”
Cost Reporting for Custom Fields
This enhancement provides more flexibility in how you report on projects and initiatives so resource allocation data always accurately reflects your engineering practice. Now LinearB Enterprise users can automatically report FTE allocation, percentage of total work, and real currency costs associated with custom fields in Jira and Azure Boards (Azure DevOps).
Resource Allocation for Azure Boards
The business-focused engineering metrics you need are now available for teams that have invested in the Microsoft ecosystem. LinearB now better integrates with Azure DevOps (specifically Azure Boards) and provides the Resource Allocation view to correlate key engineering health metrics to business impact for teams on Enterprise and Business subscriptions.
Update (8/21/2023): Resource Allocation for Azure DevOps (Boards) is now GA! Customers leveraging Azure DevOps can get started with Resource Allocation today and showcase the relationship between engineering health and business ROI.
Conclusion
As you can see, the Spring Launch of LinearB was a significant step forward for aligning to the dual mandate of engineering leadership. Our goal was to develop new features and functionality that drive improvement initiatives forward, enable teams to better align to the business, and help organizations adopt enterprise best practices.
We’re extremely excited about the future as we continue to help teams build programmable workflows, operate engineering with an eye towards the business, and meet the dual mandate.
As a reminder, we’re always looking for feedback and ideas that can help us improve the product and provide more value to our customers. Please don’t hesitate to reach out!
If you don’t have LinearB, you can get started with a free account or a trial. If you’d rather go on a guided tour to see all this in action you can get a demo now!
We’ll see you in a few months for the Summer Launch!
