Improve Engineering Efficiency with LinearB
And half of PRs are idle for 50.4% of their lifespan.
How to improve your Cycle Time
Leadership needs a bird’s eye view into the engineering organization’s performance, its position within the industry, and which parts need to improve. They then need to work with team leads to set goals, track progress, and communicate success to the business.
Team managers need to investigate further, identify bottlenecks, and work with their team to set and track progress on improvement goals.
Developers need to agree to changes, stay informed on goals, and be the agents of change.
Here are the steps to improve engineering efficiency with LinearB:
What informs your Cycle Time?
DORA defines Lead Time for Changes (a.k.a Cycle Time, a.k.a the best proxy for efficiency) as when work begins (e.g. first commit) to when code is delivered to production and into customers’ hands.
Within that metric there are several phases.
Improve one (or ideally all of them) and watch your efficiency, predictability, and value delivery improve in turn.
Benchmark current performance and define “good” for your team
Once you have a high level understanding of your team’s efficiency, get some additional context and see where you are using our engineering benchmarks.
Ultimately, you know your team and your code base better than we do. Come up with your definition of good based on your current performance, priorities, objectives, and what’s realistic.
Find your specific bottlenecks
Once a definition of good for efficiency metrics is agreed upon, it’s time to look for your leading indicators of inefficiency.
For many teams, the leading indicator of high review time (and Cycle Time) is PR size. Determining whether a team is efficient often comes down to whether they break work down into manageable chunks or not. When PRs are small they:
Other leading indicators
Only after these issues are uncovered is the whole picture of the team’s performance complete. Team leads can then surface these issues in their recurring ceremonies and ensure everyone is aware.
After that, engineering leaders and team leads can work together to come up with an improvement plan that incorporates tangible, measurable goals and low-friction tools to drive best practices.
Ready to reduce PR idle time and
improve efficiency?
Get Started
Create your improvement plan
A common pitfall when attempting to improve processes is lack of communication and alignment. Initiatives and goals won’t succeed if the team isn’t aware, aligned, and accepting.
Once team leads have baselined efficiency metrics, gotten a sense of where they stand, and discovered cycle time bottlenecks (spoiler alert: it’s probably pull request size), it’s time to take action.
Focus on one or two bottlenecks--PR size and review time, for instance--and build your plan around them.
LinearB automates away the overhead of goal setting and tracking--no more time spent with spreadsheets and manually generating reports.
Automate and track improvement
Once your plan is in place, it’s time to take action. Remember that developers are the agents of change and the ones who will drive efficiency improvements — you need to give them a low friction way to execute.
LinearB offers several tools to keep the team aligned and moving toward the same objective:
Use WorkerB, Goals, and Metrics in concert and regularly analyze and adjust them based on your team’s capabilities and working agreements.
Ultimately, progress on improving engineering efficiency should be thought of as iterative and dynamic--There is no “finish line.”
