How to accelerate engineering velocity?
Engineering Metrics
Oct 11, 2023
In today's fast-paced software development landscape, "velocity" is more than just a buzzword. It's a measure of how efficiently an engineering team can transform ideas into tangible products. But how can this velocity be accelerated? Let's delve into the strategies, metrics, and tools that can supercharge your engineering velocity.
The Role of Metrics in Engineering
Metrics are the lifeblood of any engineering organization. They provide a quantitative measure of performance, guiding teams towards optimization and continuous improvement:
Cycle Time: This metric, pivotal for any engineering team, measures the time taken from the inception of a task to its successful deployment. It encompasses coding, reviewing, testing, and merging.
Lead Time: Representing the timeframe from when a feature is requested to when it's delivered, lead time is crucial for stakeholders and decision-making processes.
The Significance of Automation
Automation, in the context of software engineering, is a game-changer. By automating repetitive tasks, teams can focus on core development activities:
Test Automation: This ensures that the software meets the desired code quality benchmarks without manual intervention, reducing downtime.
Release Automation: Streamlining the integration of new code into the main codebase, this process is integral to the development process.
Delving into Review Times
Code reviews are essential for maintaining code quality. However, prolonged review times can act as bottlenecks. By optimizing the review process, teams can enhance their engineering productivity.
Synchronizing Code Velocity with Project Management
It's essential that code velocity metrics align with project management ticket velocity metrics. This ensures that the engineering team's efforts resonate with the broader engineering projects, meeting business goals and stakeholder expectations.
Dashboards: The Window to Metrics
Dashboards offer a consolidated view of various metrics, from pull requests, lines of code, to the intricacies of cycle time. They empower engineering leaders with actionable insights, facilitating informed decision-making.
Navigating Downtime and Bottlenecks
Every engineering team faces challenges. Identifying bottlenecks early, understanding their root causes, and implementing solutions can significantly enhance team performance. This might involve tweaking the workflow, reallocating resources, or redefining the engineering process.
Leadership in Engineering
Engineering leadership plays a pivotal role in shaping team productivity. Leaders must ensure that team members are equipped with the right tools, training, and resources. They also need to foster a culture of collaboration, innovation, and continuous learning.
The DevOps Revolution
DevOps bridges the gap between development and operations. By embracing this approach, engineering teams can achieve faster releases, reduced lead times, and heightened customer satisfaction.
Continuous Improvement: The Way Forward
The quest for accelerated engineering velocity is ongoing. Teams must stay abreast of the latest frameworks, technologies, and best practices. Embracing continuous improvement and automation will be key drivers of future success.
BuildPulse: The Ultimate Tool for Engineering Velocity
To truly harness the power of engineering velocity, teams need state-of-the-art tools. BuildPulse Engineering Metrics offers deep insights into engineering productivity metrics, enabling teams to optimize their processes and deliver unparalleled value.
Conclusion
Achieving accelerated engineering velocity requires a blend of the right metrics, strategies, and tools. By focusing on the strategies outlined above and leveraging tools like BuildPulse Engineering Metrics, engineering teams can set themselves up for success, driving innovation, growth, and customer satisfaction.
FAQ
What is the difference between a flaky test and a false positive?
A false positive is a test failure in your test suite due to an actual error in the code being executed, or a mismatch in what the test expects from the code.
A flaky test is when you have conflicting test results for the same code. For example, while running tests if you see that a test fails and passes, but the code hasn’t changed, then it’s a flaky test. There’s many causes of flakiness.
What is an example of a flaky test?
An example can be seen in growing test suites - when pull request builds fail for changes you haven’t made. Put differently, when you see a test pass and fail without any code change. These failed tests are flaky tests.
What are common causes of flakiness?
Broken assumptions in test automation and development process can introduce flaky tests - for example, if test data is shared between different tests whether asynchronous, high concurrency, or sequential, the results of one test can affect another.
Poorly written test code can also be a factor. Improper polling, race conditions, improper event dependency handling, shared test data, or timeout handling for network requests or page loads. Any of these can lead to flaky test failures and test flakiness.
End-to-end tests that rely on internal API uptime can cause test flakiness and test failures.
What's the impact of flaky tests?
Flaky tests can wreck havoc on the development process - from wasted developer time from test retries, to creating bugs and product instability and missed releases, time-consuming flaky tests can grind your development process to a halt.
What is the best way to resolve or fix flaky tests?
Devops, software engineering, and software development teams will often need to compare code changes, logs, and other context across test environments from before the test instability started, and after - adding retries or reruns can also help with debugging. Test detection and test execution tooling can help automate this process as well.
BuildPulse enables you to find, assess impact metrics, quarantine, and fix flaky tests.
What are some strategies for preventing flaky tests?
Paying attention and prioritizing flaky tests as they come up can be a good way to prevent them from becoming an issue. This is where a testing culture is important - if a flaky test case is spotted by an engineer, it should be logged right away. This, however, takes a certain level of hygiene - BuildPulse can provide monitoring so flaky tests are caught right away.
What type of tests have flaky tests?
Flaky tests can be seen across the testing process - unit tests, integration tests, end-to-end tests, UI tests, acceptance tests.
What if I don't have that many flaky tests?
Flaky tests can be stealthy - often ignored by engineers and test runs are retried, they build up until they can’t be ignored anymore. These automated tests slow down developer productivity, impact functionality, and reduce confidence in test results and test suites. Better to get ahead while it’s easy and invest in test management.
It’s also important to prevent regressions to catch flakiness early while it’s manageable.
What languages and continuous integration providers does BuildPulse work with?
BuildPulse integrates with all continuous integration providers (including GitHub Actions, BitBucket Pipelines, and more), test frameworks, and workflows.
Combat non-determinism, drive test confidence, and provide the best experience you can to your developers!
How long does implementation/integration with BuildPulse take?
Implementation/integration takes 5 minutes!