Case Studies

OpenTable is a renowned leader in restaurant tech, with products that anticipate the ever-evolving needs of both restaurants and diners. Its website, opentable.com — which helps restaurants fill more than 1.6 billion seats a year — is supported by globally distributed teams of engineers.

In 2019, the site was rearchitected, and OpenTable was faced with the challenge of bringing together many teams as the commercial site was rebuilt as a monolith. During this project, Code Climate supported engineering leaders in gaining further visibility into their engineering processes, which enabled them to bring consistency and reliability to development — ultimately empowering their teams to collaborate more effectively.

Reliable Engineering Management with Code Climate

John Nolan, Senior Director of Engineering at OpenTable, said their approach to rearchitecting was essential for consolidating ideas and ensuring consistency across many globally distributed teams. Code Climate helped them to better measure effectiveness and more easily identify bottlenecks that might hold up progress.

After learning about the benefits of Software Engineering Intelligence platforms at a Code Climate event, Nolan knew Code Climate could provide the insight OpenTable needed to more formally measure engineering impact.

Code Climate delivered insight into engineering processes so that the business could better understand if their changes were effective. For instance, he was able to see the changes over time in Code Climate for metrics like Pull Request (PR) Throughput and Cycle Time.

The goal was to work with Code Climate and identify opportunities to help the teams work together more effectively. Ultimately, they would support improvements in efficiency and productivity as they improved communication and collaboration. In the first year, PR Throughput per Contributor increased by 40%. With more people working more productively, the team realized gains in output.

“Code Climate gave us valuable data to see that the things we were doing were solving the problems that we needed to,” Nolan said. “We saw metrics get better because we were building the right things in the right way.”

Critical Insight for Engineering Leadership

Nolan is in a new role and another step away from the code, and he finds the insight from Code Climate valuable in understanding the complexities of the engineering organization at OpenTable. Both standard and custom reports have proven helpful in identifying activity patterns and maintaining development speed across their widely distributed teams. He said that, while individual engineering managers often know about their own teams’ activities, the visibility Code Climate provides is useful in identifying trends and understanding team-by-team activity.

OpenTable has expanded Code Climate use and has now deployed the platform across all product engineering teams throughout its global engineering organization. Because Code Climate built its solution with enterprises in mind, with an unique ability to ingest and normalize data with reliability and speed at scale, supporting the engineering team at OpenTable to better visualize metrics and understand engineering impact and team health.

“It's invaluable to have a glance at teams' health and have the data necessary to understand where we need to address any issues,” he said.

After OpenTable again expanded their partnership with Code Climate, it has further increased visibility and supported leaders in identifying more opportunities to improve throughput and move faster as an organization. With that information, it was possible for the organization to make changes that kept PR Throughput high while decreasing Cycle Time by 57% and Time to Merge by 23%.

Code Climate supports OpenTable with the data they need. With Code Climate, they have the visibility and understanding necessary to maintain consistency across teams, ensure efficiency, and cultivate a culture of engineering excellence throughout the organization.

Key Highlights

• In the first year, PR Throughput per contributor increased by 40%
• In 2023, OpenTable saw a 57% decrease in Cycle Time
• In 2023, they saw a 23% decrease in Time to Merge

To find out how Code Climate can support you in identifying opportunities for improvement, speak to an expert.

Alloy, a leading provider of financial risk solutions, was founded on a simple idea — the more data you have to make a decision, the more confident you’ll be in that decision. So, it's no surprise that Code Climate’s Velocity, a Software Engineering Intelligence (SEI) platform that provides rich insights on team performance and impact, has been a critical resource for their organization since 2021.

Velocity connects to the tools their teams use, then extracts and interprets data with added context to provide deep insights, analysis, and visualizations that make it easy to see and understand team health and performance. Metrics like PR Throughput, Time to Merge, and Cycle Time allow them to keep a pulse on team efficiency and identify any bottlenecks that might be impacting their ability to reliably deliver software.

“Of course, the data is out there, but using Velocity is so much faster and more convenient. The quality of presentation and reporting enables us to more easily consume the information, surface trends, and put our findings into action. And that is extremely valuable to us,” one engineering leader said.

Data from Velocity helps Alloy understand the impact of their teams and showcase improvements in execution. Since they started using the platform, they’ve seen improvements in metrics across the board. Some highlights include: reducing their Cycle Time by 57%, improving both Time to Open and Time to Merge by 55%, and, most notably, increasing PR Throughput per contributor by an incredible 388%.

Fostering Team Health and Talent

The ability to drill down to the contributor level gives leaders at Alloy meaningful insights to help with coaching and goal setting for individual engineers. There are many examples of managers using Velocity to identify high performers who might be looking for their next challenge, or team members who might not meet benchmarks and could benefit from additional coaching. Alloy team leaders often use data from the platform to reveal areas of strength and weakness to help guide engineering talent on paths of growth and success.

Another engineering leader explained: “It helps to have data and benchmarks to show both individuals and teams for coaching. We can set realistic targets and then showcase improvement and growth. Velocity is important to creating paths for success for our engineers and for fostering a healthy engineering culture.”

Key Highlights

• Reduced Cycle Time by 57%
• improved Time to Open by 55%
• Improved Time to Merge by 55%
• Increased PR Throughput per contributor by an incredible 388%
• Improved ability to set realistic targets and then showcase improvement and growth

To find out how Velocity can help your organization lean into data-driven decision-making, speak to a Velocity specialist.

Faire is a fast-growing online wholesale marketplace connecting independent retailers and emerging brands worldwide. Since launching in 2017, the company now supports 100,000 brands and 700,000 retailers across 50,000 cities. Reaching this point of scale in just a few years required aggressive yet mindful growth within engineering. During this period, Faire leadership relied on Code Climate Velocity to provide critical visibility into team performance to ensure they could predictably deliver on objectives while continually onboarding new engineers.

The power of engineering data

Paul Poppert, head of engineering at Faire, is a huge believer in the power of data.

“If you want to understand the evolution of anything — from personal finances to health and fitness to organizational excellence — you need a way to collect data around the activity and find the signals within that data,” he said.

Visibility into engineering processes — and the ability to capture signals from engineering data — has been critical to the evolution of Faire’s engineering team, which has grown 18x since Poppert assumed his role in 2019. Before selecting Code Climate Velocity, he and his team tried using a few competitive and home-grown tools, but these proved difficult to integrate, time-consuming to manage, and lacking in capabilities. It was a massive distraction from high-value work.

“I was trying to onboard new managers that didn't understand how you use these tools, and we were just too busy for that. And so that's when we decided we needed a more advanced platform and wanted to partner with a company where it would be a healthy business relationship. We investigated multiple companies, and Code Climate was the best fit.”

Faire onboarded with Code Climate when it was on the cusp of massive company growth. In the two years since, the team has grown from 100 to 360 engineers, and visibility into performance has enabled Poppert to keep teams working predictably toward business outcomes. For example, as Faire was onboarding large cohorts, he used Velocity to understand how this impacted overall output and execution, so he could prepare for onboarding future groups. They could adjust workloads and commitments, and reallocate time to getting new team members up to speed, knowing it would benefit their output in the long run.

“We were able to invest a ton in bringing new engineers up to speed, nurturing them, and pairing them with more senior engineers,” Poppert explained. “We could do this with the visibility we had from Velocity because we could set realistic expectations, and knew we would see the rebound in execution when these investments started to pay off. And we absolutely did.”

Though Poppert was already happy with the teams’ output, now his teams are hitting record output levels per person because they were able to manage onboarding mindfully. And with Velocity, he has the data to show company leadership and peers his team’s value stream. Within the last year, PR Throughput has increased by 60% and Push Count has increased by 65%.

Velocity powers engineering excellence

When it comes to metrics, Poppert said he focuses less on goal setting and more on using metrics to understand what is happening within his engineering organization, which is made up of five teams — four product and one platform team. He can look at metrics like PR per contributor, PR Throughput, Cycle Time, or Time to First Review and compare between teams or over time to identify changes that might signal problems to be addressed. He noted, however, that the platform team’s work differs significantly from a product team’s. So, naturally, metrics do as well, with much lower active coding days yet higher PRs per contributor based on the type of work they are responsible for.

Engineering leaders at Faire also use Velocity as a way to foster a healthy culture. For instance, the Team360 view offers insight into how and when teams work, which is a valuable tool for managers to spot early warning signs of burnout and adjust workloads accordingly. The calendar view can show when teams may have more unplanned work or when engineers work at night and on weekends, which can be discussed in retros with the team.

Velocity also reveals important insights about performance indicators, which help managers to guide individual and team growth. The platform can help leaders identify high performers who may be prolific contributors, or those who can quickly and easily adapt to changes in project requirements. It can also identify the team players doing frequent Code Reviews and mentoring other engineers, and even shine a light on team members who may be struggling so managers can get them support before a problem occurs.

“If you have a large team, you cannot always trust personal perceptions or status reports, which can be subjective,” Poppert said. “You need real visibility into what is happening in your engineering organization. Code Climate Velocity gives us that.”

Is your engineering team growing quickly? Learn how Velocity can help your engineering organization gain critical visibility when you need it most. Speak with a product specialist.

TripleLift is a revolutionary AdTech company elevating brands with advanced targeting and design-forward branding. Behind the company is a large team of high-performing software engineers. Engineering Manager Chris Oman knew his team was making a significant impact on the business, but needed a way to quantify and communicate that impact. Since adopting Code Climate Velocity, Oman has been able to leverage a host of engineering metrics to demonstrate the team’s progress.

In a constantly evolving industry like AdTech, software engineers must move quickly and continually innovate to remain competitive. Evaluating metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) to drive improvements is part of the company’s commitment to continuous learning and growth. For TripleLift’s organization of more than 120 engineers, this has changed over the past year, as the team works to hone in on KPIs that truly measure developer success.

“Velocity uses our actual data so we can find areas of improvement instead of relying on gut instinct alone,” said Oman.

Oman uses Velocity several times a week to keep a pulse on how his team is performing and see where they may be running into roadblocks. Before adopting Velocity, Oman said he was not reporting on these metrics at all, so there was little opportunity to demonstrate developer productivity and value to management.

The platform has helped TripleLift increase PR Throughput by 46%, Push Count by 77%, and Commit Volume by 62%. The team also looks at the PR Resolution metric, which shows outliers and helps spotlight good behaviors and so they can replicate best practices across teams.

Guiding Developers to Personal Success

Team360 views in Velocity help Engineering Managers at TripleLift keep teams on track to meet their goals. Transparency into workflows enables leaders to better understand how teams operate and pass learnings along to other developers. Using these insights, the team is able to improve processes and productivity. They’ve also been able to enhance team retrospectives by looking at the PR Resolution module, which shows the journey of a Pull Request from the first commit to when it is merged (or in some cases, where it is abandoned or closed).

Oman said after using Velocity he is more conscious of PR Cycle Times. Since introducing the platform, TripleLift’s Cycle Time has decreased.

Notably, Velocity provided Oman with important insights to help manage individual developers.

“We had individual contributors that I know were doing great work but it was being overlooked because they were not committing code as frequently as they should,” he explained. “I was able to coach them to commit more frequently. In other cases, I’ve been able to reward high performers, and discourage unhealthy practices across teams, like working on weekends.”

At TripleLift, leadership knows that engineering productivity is about more than just coding — there is a holistic value that teams bring to the business. With Velocity, they have the metrics and insights to show impact and  drive efficiency and improvements to remain competitive in the fast-paced AdTech world.

Learn how Velocity can help your engineering organization reduce Cycle Time and incorporate data into decision making. Speak with a product specialist.

KOHO Financial, a fintech company based in Toronto, has built its reputation on delivering innovative, digital-first products that make financial services more accessible for Canadians. With over 500,000 customers across the country, KOHO’s engineering leaders need deep visibility into the performance of their app-based financial solutions and teams in order to ensure fast and stable software delivery.

The company’s Director of Engineering, Chris McCann, turned to Code Climate Velocity, a Software Engineering Intelligence (SEI) platform, to boost the efficiency of the team, find and eliminate roadblocks, and work toward consistent, predictable delivery.

“One of the greatest benefits we’ve received from Velocity is becoming a more efficient engineering organization,” said McCann. “The platform helps us identify issues before they become big problems.”

Always-on visibility into team performance helps leaders identify problems early to eliminate roadblocks so teams can predictably deliver on outcomes. McCann and the team used Velocity to surface key metrics like PR Throughput to evaluate the health of their processes. If PR Throughput is low, engineering leaders will want to investigate related metrics and processes: Are developers being pulled away from high-value work to resolve incidents? Are they implementing best practices for Code Review to catch issues before they go to production?

McCann also took advantage of Velocity’s annotation capabilities to add context to reports, discovering that a drop-off in productivity could be due to something as simple as a light workload or planned vacations — or the team could be stuck on a tough problem that requires more support.

With both pre-built and custom reporting options, McCann said he has incredible visibility into team performance: “There are so many ways to really dig in, see how teams are performing, and isolate issues quickly.”

Validating Process Changes to Improve Efficiency

In two years of using Velocity, KOHO has gained invaluable insight into the engineering organization’s strengths and opportunities for growth. Armed with data, they’ve made important changes to improve efficiency and predictability in product delivery.

One significant change was the move away from a dedicated quality assurance (QA) team to a developer-driven model. This encouraged developers to take more ownership over Code Reviews, which led to better quality code. With a more efficient use of engineering resources, Code Review times decreased. QA team members were offered the opportunity to upskill and transition into development over a six-month period.

Velocity surfaced relevant insights to help the team transition, providing leaders with justification for how resources were being reallocated. The engineering organization was also able to uncover unexpected challenges due to the reorganization: with multiple developers creating tests for an endpoint, they returned a large, complex dataset containing redundancies.

During this process, Velocity provided the necessary visibility to help transition team members and ensure they had the resources they needed to be successful. The team looked at Impact and Productive Impact metrics to make sure that developers owning QA did not diminish their ability to deliver. Then, they cross-referenced that with the quality and customer support teams to confirm that developer-driven quality was actually working from a customer perspective.

It also uncovered unexpected challenges with the new process that they’ve been able to solve. For example, multiple developers creating tests for an endpoint that returns a big set of data resulted in unnecessary redundancy and complexity.

As the transition occurred, leaders were able to see Impact metrics trending upward throughout the timespan, while new code remained relatively stable. They were able to monitor rework alongside code pushes to make comparisons that either support the benefits or highlight weaknesses. Ultimately, the change from dedicated QA to developer-driven QA resulted in reduced rework. With data from Velocity, KOHO was able to demonstrate the success of the initiative.

As another example, in late 2022, KOHO’s engineering department implemented “no meeting Wednesdays” to see if a full day of focus time improved performance. Engineers were excited about the change, but leaders looked to Velocity for validation. Within two weeks, Impact metrics and PR Throughput were trending up — not just on Wednesdays, but the subsequent Thursdays and Fridays as well. This showed that increased focus time on Wednesdays enabled developers to get more done, and the additional work carried over into Thursday and Friday via Code Review. After the holidays, metrics began to show impressive results and the change became permanent for the engineering organization. In early 2023, the mid-week no-meeting policy expanded company-wide.

KOHO’s engineering teams have recently started digging into DORA metrics in Velocity’s Analytics module, which address critical areas of engineering performance. These metrics include Mean Lead Time for Changes, Deployment Frequency, Change Failure Rate, and Mean Time to Recovery. Now that the teams can see these measurements alongside other engineering metrics in Velocity, they can make higher-impact adjustments to their processes and better balance the speed and stability of software delivery.

Cultivating Individual and Team Success

At KOHO, building better financial solutions starts with cultivating a collaborative environment where people are energized by their work and encouraged to take ownership of their success. In this regard, Velocity has become a meaningful platform for both leadership and individual contributors. McCann said engineers track their PR Throughput and Code Review to understand their output. Personal performance metrics can highlight the areas where they excel, surface opportunities for growth, and encourage more collaboration between peers.

Engineering leaders can also identify and reward high-performing teams and individuals. Equally as important, they can more easily spot when developers may be struggling, and take action to support them.

“As engineering leaders, we can’t be in the weeds with our teams every day, so it's reassuring to know I have Velocity in my pocket, which allows me to drill down when necessary to investigate issues. Velocity provides the visibility I need, when I need it, to make informed decisions that keep our company moving forward.”

To learn more about how Velocity offers critical visibility for engineering leaders, schedule a platform demo.

Over the past few years, a shift in consumer behavior has supercharged e-commerce, emphasizing the importance for companies to optimize the digital experience for their customers. Increased demand has driven significant growth for e-commerce solution provider Yottaa, which now helps more than 1,500 sites achieve better performance, boosting conversions and revenue.

Behind the industry-leading e-commerce optimization platform is a growing team of engineers who prioritize efficient delivery and continuous innovation to bring value to customers. To ensure his teams have what they need to be successful, Director of Engineering Dan Biagini needs rich insight into team performance, which is impossible to acquire manually. In 2022, Yottaa reached a tipping point, leading to an easy decision to onboard with Code Climate Velocity, a Software Engineering Intelligence platform.

Purpose-built for engineering management

Biagini said the engineering organization was reinforcing its commitment to agile and closely evaluating how it worked. Concurrently, there was a company-wide push to make data-driven process improvements and implement dashboards for more consumable reporting. But with a large team and increasing demands, Biagini struggled to manually extract helpful information from existing tools and felt that building homegrown dashboards and spreadsheets was painful and time-consuming.

“Having a tool that provides deep insight into how our teams are performing is really important, and I believe Velocity is purpose-built to fulfill this need,” Biagini said.

Biagini felt that competitive products in the market were overly focused on financial reporting or lacked broad visibility. Velocity seamlessly integrates with existing tools and workflows to give a complete picture of engineering processes and performance. Armed with actionable insight, engineering leaders can easily align initiatives with strategic priorities, accelerate software delivery, and drive continuous improvement within their teams.

Turnkey deployment adds value on day one

Velocity’s turnkey deployment enabled Biagini and other engineering leaders at Yottaa to immediately begin building useful reports. Onboarding was as simple as connecting the platform to Jira and Github and leveraging the built-in reporting features to understand key metrics like Cycle Time and PR Throughput. Velocity also made it easy to share clear yet comprehensive reports and dashboards with leadership.

“It worked right out of the box. I was able to take the results and run with them immediately. I didn’t have to train a team on yet another platform or use more tools than we need,” said Biagini. “The fact that Velocity simply overlays on top of the tools we are already using and pulls out the data is just so powerful.”

With insight into engineering processes, Yottaa’s engineering teams were able to align on goals and identify bottlenecks for immediate improvement. Within three months, they decreased Cycle Time by 8% and increased PR Throughput by 10%. They also decreased PR size by 29%, which enabled faster reviews and reduced risk during PR merges. These improvements are significant because their focus in early Q1 is often getting through the deployment backlog that slows down during the holiday season to preserve platform stability.

Data-driven decision-making

Biagini said sophisticated insight into the cyclical nature of their e-commerce technology team has been an unexpected value add. The team spends October through December limiting the amount of code they push into production, often using this time to work through support requests and address technical debt. In January, deployment ramps up, impacting metrics like Cycle Time. With Velocity, it is easier to see how cyclical changes impact teams and communicate this impact to leadership.

Biagini is looking forward to leveraging the new DORA metrics capabilities within the context of other engineering metrics in the Velocity Analytics module to dig deeper into possible process improvements and identify how to make the highest-impact adjustments. He also said he sees how data from Velocity will support decisions about future development efforts, resource allocation, and expanding headcount.

“We can really map out the reality of the business and more easily communicate it to others,” Biagini said.

To learn more about how Velocity can help your organization decrease Cycle Time and increase PR throughput, speak with a product specialist.

HealthSherpa is the largest marketplace for private health insurance in the U.S., with millions of customers enrolled each year. HealthSherpa offers affordable coverage provided by 40-plus insurance carriers and more than 45,000 agents nationwide. Their online platform is designed to simplify the insurance enrollment process for consumers.

As a software company, the engineering department at HealthSherpa plays a critical role in achieving business outcomes. HealthSherpa's VP of Engineering, Joseph Gefroh, believes data-driven processes are the key to healthy, high-performing teams. When he joined HealthSherpa in 2021, the company was still operating as a startup — innovative and agile, but not actively evaluating its practices to ensure repeatable success.

In working to mature the company’s DevOps practices, Gefroh said his initial assessments were intuition-based. He drew from more than a decade of experience in software engineering to implement best practices to streamline processes and align his teams with business goals. However, he quickly moved on to tackling more significant opportunities for improvement, but gathering data to perform proper evaluation proved cumbersome and time-consuming.

“I was building lists and spreadsheets using the minimal resources I had, but this consumed dozens of hours each month,” Gefroh said. “And I was still only gathering basic metrics like Cycle Time. I couldn’t even get data like Time to Merge, which would help us actually improve some of the bottlenecks in our process.”

Actionable Insights From Day One

HealthSherpa needed a better way to get accurate, actionable insights to drive improvements to their DevOps processes, and Code Climate’s Velocity platform delivered immediate value.

“Other tools for measuring engineering performance are complicated. Many of them use their own scoring system for what it means to be productive with a lot of data that isn’t relevant for my team and not based on industry standards,” said Gefroh. “Velocity has a user-friendly interface. It provides the metrics I actually want, and it’s easy to make correlations immediately.”

With access to accurate metrics, HealthSherpa was able to identify bottlenecks and surface trends that opened up opportunities for improvement. Within the first year, they were able to decrease Cycle Time by 31% and Time to Merge by 41%. As a result, PR Throughput increased 48%, Commit Volume went up 54%, and Pushes increased by 94%. They also saw a 62% improvement year over year in Time to First Review.

Gefroh said Time to Merge is a key metric, as it helps it identify issues that slow down development processes. HealthSherpa saw this data trending upward, which led them to investigate further. By viewing correlations between metrics within Velocity, they were able to find that their new, more rigid code review process had impacted their Time to Merge. Ultimately, that the team was more carefully considering code quality and non-functional requirements during reviews was a necessary, beneficial change, even if it meant an increased Time to Merge.

Comprehensive visibility has been essential to planning for the seasonal changes that are inherent to the health insurance industry. Seeing the immediate impact as seasons shift — and correlating that data with historical trends — enables them to intentionally plan for changes in the risk profile and increased demand, and intervene more quickly when issues arise.

HealthSherpa has also gained value from Code Climate’s continuous innovation efforts, particularly the recent introduction of DORA metrics into the Velocity Analytics module.

“Code Climate’s Velocity platform already played a critical role in improving the health of our engineering organization. With the insights provided, we could remove bottlenecks and reduce our Cycle Time from 120 hours to less than 48 hours,” said Joseph Gefroh, Vice President of Engineering at HealthSherpa. “Now, we can view DORA metrics in the context of the other Velocity data, which saves substantial time and provides a clear picture of our team's performance.”

Fostering a Healthy Culture of Ownership and Collaboration

Beyond the obvious performance benefits, Gefroh said that Code Climate helps to facilitate a more collaborative, healthy team culture in which engineering teams have what they need to make informed decisions. Engineering managers can see real-time impact, positive or negative, from process changes, and better evaluate their long-term strategy.

“Our teams know that the actual numbers matter less than what those numbers mean,” Gefroh explained. “Code Climate allows us to look deeper to understand the context behind changes.”

With ownership over performance, engineering managers are empowered to drive process changes, identify coaching opportunities, and foster a culture of collaboration. The result is less friction, happier teams, and better engineering outcomes.

“With less engineering pain, teams have more confidence in the processes and the work they are doing, which leads to better quality software, faster deployments, and more successful results. To achieve this, we need comprehensive, actionable metrics in real-time, and the only way to get those is with Code Climate Velocity.”

Learn more about day one impact with Velocity by booking a demo.

Beyond Finance is a tech-forward company that helps individuals find freedom from debt. Software is the foundation of its business model, and the culture is inherently iterative, always seeking improvement. Leadership values its people and goes the extra mile to create an environment where employees can flourish. The end goal is achieving the best outcomes for clients and the business as a whole, and improving engineering team health.

The company’s innovative approach has fueled massive growth. Beyond Finance has earned the trust of over 200,000 clients, helping to resolve more than $1 billion in debt along the way. As Beyond Finance scales to support a rapidly growing user base and builds new products to maintain its position as an industry leader, its engineering team, which doubled over the past three years, continues bringing in new talent at a rapid pace.

Sergio Rabiela, vice president of technology, said that visibility into the health of the engineering organization is essential to support a growing team. Code Climate’s Velocity helps with onboarding new engineers.

“We set goals as a team, put them in Velocity, and track our progress. It’s tough to do that without a Software Engineering Intelligence platform,” Rabiela said.

Eliminating the Manual Drag of Metrics

The Beyond Finance engineering culture has always been collaborative and reflective, with a goal of continuous improvement. But when Rabiela joined in 2019, it required a lot of effort to glean insight into the development pipeline, bottlenecks, and project status. At that time, Rabiela had to log into development tools to look at individual pull requests and code reviews and manually collect data to get a complete picture of what the team was accomplishing.

Rabiela had experience with Code Climate’s Velocity in a previous role and knew the platform could deliver the insight he needed without the manual effort. Fortunately, it wasn’t long before they had the technology in place and leadership at Beyond Finance was able to gain immediate value.

Not only did Beyond Finance experience substantial time savings during reporting, but the tool revealed some interesting gaps they didn’t expect. They had the context necessary to correlate important metrics like PR throughput with the activities that impacted results. For example, the extra time teams spent troubleshooting issues in production affected how often they could push code, and meeting cycles extended code review times. They were even able to adjust their weekly schedule to create an environment that allowed their developers more time for the activities that mattered most — a change that the team appreciated.

“Velocity gives us signals that something is off in our environment or the way things are working so that we can address it proactively before it becomes a problem that impacts the organization. It is especially helpful at surfacing things that are hard to see otherwise,” Rabiela said.

With this visibility, Beyond Finance increased PR throughput by more than 700% in the first year and continued to improve throughout 2021. In 2022, they maintained high throughput rates despite nearly doubling their contributor count — a change that can often slow teams down.

Fostering Engineering Team Health and Success

Velocity is essential in maintaining healthy workflows, achieving goals, and identifying opportunities for skills development. Rabiela said they frequently use the Developer360 team view to understand the various dimensions of their development activities. This insight guides managers to adjust processes if a project seems to be going off course or to make changes for future sprints. Additionally, visibility into trends in throughput and review times serve as a consistent baseline for measuring progress toward goals.

It’s also valuable for developers, who get alerts when PRs have gone more than 24 hours without being addressed. And managers use individual developer metrics to help new engineers grow and build the right habits, like pushing code to GitHub at frequent intervals.

“Many of these metrics would be nearly impossible to find without Velocity, because tools like GitHub are really just about the code you write, not necessarily the reviews or the comments. You lose a lot of context and end up with missing pieces. The daily activities of our engineers encompass a lot more than just writing code,” Rabiela said.

Ultimately, Code Climate helps the engineering team at Beyond Finance uphold the company’s commitment to continuous improvement so it can ensure its products and processes are the best they can possibly be.

Want to learn how to improve engineering team health in your organization with data-driven visibility? Speak with a Velocity Product Specialist.

In the midst of pandemic lockdowns, VTS, a leading provider of commercial real estate technology, was in a period of rapid growth. In addition to aggressive hiring, VTS grew through acquisitions, adding Rise Buildings and Lane to its portfolio. Soon after onboarding, they discovered the new teams had less effective SDLC processes, which caused Cycle Time to trend toward 80 hours — nearly double the average Cycle Time of the core VTS team.

Engineering leadership leaned heavily on Code Climate as they incorporated the new teams and integrated the new products into the VTS platform. They leveraged Code Climate's partnership to investigate bottlenecks, and discovered the teams were spending Cycle Time resolving issues and needed more efficient workflows.

Fostering an Elite Engineering Culture

Being customer-obsessed and striving for excellence are the core tenets are the foundation of VTS culture. And for engineering, these values drive an ambitious vision of producing elite engineering talent who innovate to serve customers, achieve business outcomes, and positively impact the broader tech industry.

With more than 20 teams and 200-plus engineers, VTS fosters a high-caliber engineering culture built on mutual trust. They have collectively embraced a vision of engineering excellence, and they leverage Code Climate to measure proficiency and success, surface bottlenecks, and actively explore ways to improve. Code Climate's solution delivers end-to-end visibility into the entire development pipeline, which is crucial for tracking engineering progress and achieving OKRs with a large, distributed team.

Prashanth Sanagavarapu, Head of Platform Engineering at VTS, said without these insights, every decision would be a shot in the dark. “As a manager, my worst nightmare is running blind. I need to make decisions based on data and facts, and Code Climate provides exactly what we need.”

Metrics That Matter

For VTS, Code Climate provides visibility into the metrics that matter, and it is more intuitive and robust than what is built into other engineering tools. For example, Jira reporting was inadequate because it lacked context, and engineering leaders couldn’t compare metrics to industry standards.

“An ops team may close 100 tickets, but what does that mean? Someone has to go into each ticket and read the description to understand what is happening, and that just isn’t sustainable,” said Sanagavarapu.

Code Climate allows them to analyze factors like Pull Request (PR) size, frequency, and time to close, enabling them to optimize workflows to consistently deliver incremental value and maintain engineering velocity. Sanagavarapu said he learns quite a lot through the platform: “It’s a fact tool for me. I can see the trends of what is working and what isn’t working for a particular squad and correlate it back to sprint retros.”

Cycle Time is the north star metric at VTS. Measuring Cycle Time every two weeks with Code Climate provides visibility into how fast they are shipping, both organization-wide and at the team level, and it enables them to quickly see when fluctuations occur. Then, within the platform, they can easily drill down to identify choke points and dependencies that may be impacting performance. Understanding if the Cycle Time went up due to outages, open RFCs, or a change in personnel helps leaders to understand trends and better allocate resources to ensure their teams have what they need to be successful.

Sanagavarapu said the ability to drill down to the individual contributor level is very impactful because it allows you to diagnose problems at any level and scale. Since partnering with Code Climate, they have improved Cycle Time by 30% and doubled their deployment frequency.

“Our average Cycle Time tends to be around 35 hours with 48 hours as our max threshold. When we exceed that, we know there is something going on. If it’s not a holiday or another known factor, we can dig to discover and understand the problem and who is being impacted — then, we can solve it.”

Maintaining Excellence During Rapid Growth

Enhanced visibility has been crucial for engineering leadership over the past two years, with company growth accelerating during challenging pandemic lockdowns. Sanagavarapu said more than 60% of the company’s 600-plus employees joined during this time, most of whom were engineers.

Infrastructure stability was a big challenge, so they worked to reduce the number of incidents so that dev teams could spend more time on value-add work. When they discovered a lag time in PRs due to time zone differences, they changed their workflows to reduce the time for feedback and better manage resources across teams. They also added in more test cycles so that rework happened less frequently. Now, the entire engineering organization maintains Cycle time under its 48-hour threshold.

“Code Climate provided insights that helped us accelerate integrating those teams into our culture and processes more quickly and effectively,” Sanagavarapu said.

Measuring Impact

VTS leverages Code Climate's solution to track and quantify impact at all levels. Engineering leadership can measure business impact by translating metrics into stories that show how engineering delivers value. They can understand how quickly teams deliver new features that are important for customers and compare the time spent on new feature work to rework time to ensure engineering time and resources are optimized.

Code Climate surfaces important trends that help engineering managers better understand the impact of process and workflow changes on developer experience. They can drill down to the developer level to diagnose issues and determine what might be consuming a squad’s time. Visibility into engineering capacity helps planning for major initiatives, allowing them to best leverage internal resources and balance workloads with external contractors.

As VTS works continuously to innovate, evolve, and achieve both engineering and business milestones, the insights derived from Code Climate are invaluable, Sanagavarapu explained. “Code Climate is not a reporting tool. It’s the heart of engineering excellence.”

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