Code Climate

When global circumstances required our team to go completely remote, we knew things would be tough. Team members wouldn’t just be working from home; they’d be working from home during a time of intense fear and uncertainty, with a myriad of new concerns and distractions. We expected that engineering activity would decline as a result, and we were understanding — as our VP of Engineering, Ale Paredes, explained during a panel on working remotely through the crisis, “We're not trying to behave as if it's business as usual, because it's not business as usual.” 

But when Ale checked the team’s productivity metrics in Velocity, our engineering analytics platform, she was surprised by what she found. After we made the switch to a distributed workflow, many engineers actually started working more. Still, despite logging more time in the codebase, they were getting less done.

To find out why the team wasn’t making progress, Ale dug deeper into the data. Not only did she find answers, she used that information to develop better ways to support the team.

How CodeClimate's VP of Engineering Used Data to Support Our Engineering Team on a Human Level

This Slogging thread by  and Arthur Tkachenko occurred in slogging's official #programming channel, and has been edited for readability.

Introducing a Simple Module for Parsing CSV Files

Gathering context and showing empathy may be the most difficult parts of a performance review, but they’re also the most important — this year, more than ever.

How to Reshape Performance Reviews for a Difficult Year and Beyond

Continuous Delivery is the ability to ship code quickly, safely, and consistently, and it’s a necessity for teams that wish to remain innovative and competitive. It’s focused on delivering value to the user and starting that feedback loop early — the ideal state of Continuous Delivery is one in which your code is always ready to be deployed. 

Many engineering leaders think of CD as a workflow and focus on the tooling and processes necessary to keep code moving from commit to deploy. 

But CD is more than just a process — it’s a culture. To effectively practice CD, you need to: 

The Importance of a Continuous Delivery Culture

On average, a software development team reworks about 26% of its code prior to release. Even after accounting for necessary changes, those wasted hours can cost a medium-sized business upwards of $4.7M a year. 

Still, when engineering leaders look to cut costs, they often look at departmental spending. Software licenses, discretionary expenses, and even salaries may come under scrutiny.

But not all costs come with such a clear price tag — inefficiencies in the software development process are harder to quantify, but much more expensive. 

According to a 2017 DORA white paper, Forecasting the Value of DevOps Transformations, the cost of Rework in software development is staggering, setting businesses of all sizes back millions of dollars a year.  

Rework Costs Your Company Millions — How to Cut Back?

Processes are essential for effective management. They keep people in sync, making it possible for team members to come together and achieve a shared goal. But they’re also dangerous. Processes can create the illusion that things are running smoothly because they’re moving along according to the shared understanding of how they’re “supposed to” run. 

This is the Fallacy of Process — the idea that by adding consistency and predictability to a shared workflow, a given process is inherently valuable.

Too often, process becomes canon. A team develops an effective way of doing something, then returns to that framework indefinitely, long past its expiration date. 

Managers: Beware the Fallacy of Process

Preparing for a board meeting is a stressful experience for everyone. For many CTOs, it’s also an exercise in futility, trying to zero in on engineering KPIs that accurately represent everything that’s happened in the department. The information that usually makes it to the board deck — information on completed features and incident reports — doesn’t tell the whole story.

A list of features shows what the team accomplished, but doesn’t reveal anything about how the team works. It can’t reveal process issues that need to be addressed or highlight challenges the team has overcome. Similarly, incident reports might illuminate problems in the codebase, but they’re devoid of context about how the team is dealing with those issues. Other departments have self-evident, objective KPIs. Sales, for example, can walk through their pipeline from demos booked to contracts signed, using objective measurements to chart their department’s progress over time. 

Engineering leaders, on the other hand, must get creative to provide that level of clarity. 

You’ll need to think carefully about the story you want your slides to tell, then choose engineering KPIs that map to those specific insights. When considering a metric, we recommend asking: 

The Most Important Enginnering KPIs for Your Board Deck

When your team is building a software product, the majority of the work that they do is invisible. As a manager, you have to rely on in-person cues for blocked work or frustrated engineers. When they move to a remote workflow—your team also becomes invisible, and all those critical signals are dropped. 

In-person, you might notice:

The Essential Data for Leading a Remote Engineering Team

Code Climate’s flagship product, Velocity, analyzes all the data from your GitHub repos and provides you with heads-up displays, real-time analytics, and custom reports to give you a clearer perspective on how your engineering team is working

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