Engineering Leader's Guide to Programmable Workflows
Metrics alone don’t improve engineering teams. Intelligent workflow automation that removes friction, speeds up code reviews, standardizes merge policies, and meets developers where they are does.
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Programmable Workflows Drive Sustained Improvement
Metrics Alone ≠ Operational Excellence or Business Outcomes
Metrics and visibility are crucial, but they don’t mean much if you don’t have a way to act on the insight they provide.
The reality is that metrics are just numbers. Without action, the only change they’ll drive is another meeting getting put on your already busy schedule to discuss them–and who wants that?
Instead Use Programmable Workflows to Automate Improvement
When engineering leaders apply automation against insights from metrics like DORA, performance benchmarks, and business alignment data, they are able to build a culture of continuous improvement. It’s through this targeted use of automation that benefits like increased efficiency, higher code quality, policy standardization, and a better DevEx are realized.
“But I already have CI/CD to automate dev workflows.”
CI/CD is very powerful and provides some pretty incredible results including more quality/predictability at higher speed/scale and reduced risk. But when workflow automation is shifted further left (pre-merge) and applied to the PR process, the efficiency and quality gains compound. This is what’s known as Continuous Merge and it completes the promise of CI/CD.
Apply Automation Where Devs Spend Their Time
To reap the maximum benefits of automation, it needs to be applied strategically and meet developers where they spend their time: in collaboration/communication tools and in git repos. Some examples of these environment-specific automations include real-time alerting and PR labeling respectively. With this highly targeted approach to automation, you’ll see tangible benefits like:
Getting PRs to the right people immediately
An average 44% reduction in cycle time
Reduction in developer toil that yields higher merge and deployment frequency (and higher dev yields satisfaction)
Use Automation for Merge Standard Enforcement At Scale
This is likely not new information: Development teams operate in many different ways. While they all probably have coding standards, it’s likely that very few have merge standards–policies and goals set and enforced at scale using policy-as-code. Programmable workflows make it easy for teams to apply and adhere to merge standards, resulting in:
More time spent writing and shipping code
Less time spent in PM tools and on status updates
Reduced toil, confusion, and ambiguity with code merges