Code Climate Case Study: Springbuk

Results Achieved

64%

Increase in Pull Request Throughput

48%

Decrease in Cycle Time

91%

Decrease in Pull Request Size

Leadership aimed to grow the engineering team.

Roger Deetz joined as VP of Engineering to build out the department but quickly saw the org’s processes were not ready for scale.

Teams lacked consistency in how they shipped features to customers.

Engineers were juggling multiple tracks of work, causing delays and weeks-long bottlenecks.

Some teams had no continuous delivery process at all.

Agile practices brought “pitfalls without benefits,” according to team members.

Ambitious hiring goals existed, but there was no system to ensure new hires would be successful or productive.

Roger chose to focus on fixing internal processes before expanding the team.

Roger used Velocity to create a blueprint for stronger Agile processes across the organization.

Initially skeptical of metrics, he tried Velocity to evaluate whether process changes were effective.

He reviewed metrics weekly, focusing on Pull Request Throughput and Cycle Time.

Velocity enabled easy comparison of productivity across teams.

Roger became convinced of the value of metrics after seeing they brought focus and highlighted effective agile practices.

He discovered that less efficient teams often struggled with vague or unclear stories.

Unclear stories led to lengthy review cycles and misalignment within engineering.

Roger worked with engineering leads and product managers to standardize story writing.

Teams began writing 1-sentence actionable requests and breaking down projects over 20 effort points into smaller, independent stories.

With improved processes in place, Roger felt confident moving forward with scaling the engineering department.

“I encourage any engineering leader to start measuring with Velocity to discover their team’s successful work habits.”

—Roger Deetz, VP of Engineering, Springbuk