Launching Today: Velocity

This post is part of our historical archive. It represents the beliefs, actions, products, and services of Code Climate as of its publication date. Today, Code Climate focuses on providing enterprise leaders the software development data, context layer, and playbooks needed to build the AI-native software organization their enterprise needs. Head to codeclimate.com to learn more.

Feb 7, 2018

2 min read

Data-driven insights to boost your engineering capacity

Today we’re sharing something big: Code Climate Velocity, our first new product since 2011, is launching in open beta.

Velocity helps organizations increase their engineering capacity by identifying bottlenecks, improving day-to-day developer experience, and coaching teams with data-driven insights, not just anecdotes.

Velocity helps you answer questions like:

• Which pull requests are high risk and why? (Find out right away, not days later.)
• How does my team’s KPIs compare to industry averages? Where’s our biggest opportunity to improve?
• Are our engineering process changes making a difference? (Looking at both quantity and quality of output.)
• Where do our developers get held up? Do they spend more time waiting on code review or CI results?

Learn more about Velocity.

Why launch a new product?

Velocity goes hand-in-hand with our code quality product to help us deliver on our ultimate mission: Superpowers for Engineering Teams. One of our early users noted:

““With Velocity, I’m able to take engineering conversations that previously hinged on gut feel and enrich them with concrete and quantifiable evidence. Now, when decisions are made, we can track their impact on the team based on agreed upon metrics.” – Andrew Fader, VP Engineering, Publicis

Get started today

We’d love to help you level up your engineering organization. Request a demo here.

About

Noah Davis

Why a Strategy Matters

At the heart of every successful software engineering team is a drive for three things:

1. A culture of continuous improvement
2. The ability to move from idea to impact quickly, frequently, and with confidence
3. A software organization delivering meaningful value

These goals sound simple enough, but in reality, achieving them requires more than just wishing for better performance. It takes data, action, and, most importantly, a cultural shift. And here's the catch: those three things don't come together by accident.

Step 1: Define Your Purpose

The first step in any successful engineering insights strategy is defining why you're doing this in the first place. If you're rolling out developer productivity metrics or an insights platform, you need to make sure there’s alignment on the purpose across the board.

Step 2: Understand Your People

Once the purpose is clear, the next step is to think about who will be involved in this journey. You have to consider the following:

1. Who will be using the developer productivity tool/insights platform?
2. Are these hands-on developers or executives looking for high-level insights?
3. Who else in the organization might need access to the data, like finance or operations teams?

It's also crucial to account for organizational changes.

Step 3: Define Your Process

The next key component is process—a step that many organizations overlook.

Step 4: Program and Rollout Strategy

The next piece of the puzzle is your program and rollout strategy. It’s about designing a value loop within a smaller team or department first.

Step 5: Choose Your Platform Wisely

Finally, understanding your purpose, people, and process before you evaluate platforms is critical.

Looking Ahead

To build a successful engineering insights strategy, you need to go beyond just installing a tool. It’s about building a culture of data-driven decision-making, fostering continuous improvement, and aligning all your teams towards achieving business outcomes.

Want to build a tailored engineering insights strategy for your enterprise organization? Get expert recommendations at our free insights strategy workshop. Register here.

Andrew Gassen has guided Fortune 500 companies and large government agencies through complex digital transformations. He specializes in embedding data-driven, experiment-led approaches within enterprise environments, helping organizations build a culture of continuous improvement and thrive in a rapidly evolving world.

Sample Use Case

Subject: PR Descriptions Boost Review Speed by 30%

Experiment Lead: Mary O’Clary

Goal: We must pull a major capability from Q4 2024 into Q2 2025 to increase our revenue. We believe we can do this by improving productivity by 30%.

Opportunity: We found lack of clear descriptions were a primary cause of churn & delay during the review cycle. How might we improve PR descriptions, with information reviewers need?

Problem: Help PR Reviewers more regularly understand the scope of PRs, so they don’t need to ask developers a bunch of questions.

Solution: Issue simple guidelines for what we are looking for PR descriptions

Metric(s): PR Review Speed.

Action: We ran this experiment over one 2 week sprint, with no substantial changes in complexity of work or composition of the team.

Result: We saw PR Review Speed increase by 30%

Next Step: We will roll this out across Engineering.

Key Learnings: Clear, consistent PR descriptions reduce reviewer friction without adding developer overhead.

How to Make This Process Stick

Appoint one “editor in chief” to issue these updates each week. They should CC the experiment lead on the communication to provide visibility.

If these updates become a regular ritual, within 3 months, you’ll likely have more contributions than you can keep up with.

Give it a shot, and don’t forget to celebrate the wins along the way.