Code Climate Case Study: Resultados Digitais

Results Achieved

26%

Increase in Pull Requests Merged

45%

Decrease in Cycle Time

42%

Decrease in Pull Request Size

Leadership observed that productivity wasn’t scaling with the engineering headcount.

As more engineers joined, story completion rates did not increase as expected.

Engineering Manager Rodrigo was tasked with improving efficiency across the entire engineering org—eight squads of 3–8 engineers each.

Rodrigo felt RD’s existing story-based metrics (story throughput, lead time) were too subjective because story size and scope varied widely.

Large, impactful stories could make a team look slow, while multiple quick fixes could make a team appear artificially fast.

The team needed more precise, objective metrics to understand true performance and identify improvement opportunities.

Before focusing on efficiency, Rodrigo wanted reliable metrics that accurately represented engineering speed.

Rodrigo discovered Velocity and felt that Pull Requests were the first objective, accurate unit of measurement for engineering work.

Velocity enabled him to assess team speed using Pull Requests Merged and to identify productivity patterns across teams and sprints.

He also monitored underlying drivers of productivity, including number of reviews, review time, and revert count.

Rodrigo found that teams shipped features more frequently when they pushed smaller PRs.

Leadership introduced a new standard: no pull request larger than 400 lines of code.

They identified a strong correlation between PR size and cycle time, leading to an organization-wide emphasis on keeping PRs small.

Within three months, Resultados saw a 26% increase in pull requests merged across the organization.

Rodrigo successfully uncovered a scalable method to improve efficiency as the engineering team grew.

“I love using pull requests as a unit of work. This Velocity metric is a real measure, not an abstraction.”

—Rodrigo Miguel, Platform Engineering Manager, Resultados Digitais