We’ve launched the second version of SourceLevel in Product Hunt! Give us an upvote and leave us a review or a question. I’ll be glad to answer.
Besides the excitement, I’m very proud to say that now we fully integrate our core features to GitHub and GitLab. It’s a massive achievement for us, and I believe it’s important to celebrate.
During the year, we shipped lots of exciting new capabilities to our product. They had a massive impact on our customers and generated relevant feedback. As it’s part of the development, we also had lots of production issues and bugs, which the dev team handled very well.
Every significant milestone accomplished comes with a question – “and now what?” Besides, the year is not over, and I expect to share even more announcements before it ends. I am very optimistic and thus decided to share a sneak peek of the upcoming feature.
As we’re continually polishing our product based on community feedback, the next months’ priority may change slightly. But I am confident we will implement it sooner or later. Before jumping into the feature, let me say some words about where we are.
SourceLevel is changing directions!
After October 1st, 2021, we will focus all our efforts on our (All-in-one) Analytics & Data Platform for Engineering Teams, thus we’re discontinuing the Automated Code Review feature.
SourceLevel has two main features: Automated Code Review and Engineering Metrics
The Code Review Automation runs 30+ linters for each Pull Request (or Merge Request) and adds inline comments with the issues. It enables engineers to quickly spot, discuss, and fix any feedback from the configured static analysis tools.
Engineering Metrics has been our flagship for a couple of months now. It includes two crucial metrics: Time to Merge (also known as Cycle Time or Lead Time) and Throughput. In addition to these metrics, SourceLevel also provides an excellent view of the Work In progress.
For the next months, we want to expand the number of offered metrics and Work In Progress visibility. Check them out.
Engagement Metrics
Engagement metrics are about the team activity in the Pull Request. Engagement means Pull Requests have received at least one comment, approvals, or request changes from anyone in the team. The more people are participating, the higher the engagement.
Engagement Volume
This chart is called Engagement Volume. It shows the number of Pull Requests opened weekly and the number of comments, approves, or request changes. In my experience, the correlation of opened pull request (in bars) is crucial to contextualize the information in the lines.
Usually, the team focuses on opening too much WIP and don’t engage in their colleagues’ pull requests. Without feedback, those pull requests tend to stale, which increases the Time to Merge. So, it’s a crucial indicator for me is whether the number of comments is stable.
Another critical information extracted from the chart is the number of Request Changes. It’s normal to see a few requests over time. However, if the number is too high, managers should probably investigate.
The causes of a high number of Request Change can vary, but, in my experience, it usually indicates the lack of technical or business alignment.
Time to Engage
The other metric I want to prioritize is about the Time to Engage. It shows the number of Pull Requests with at least one interaction and the time it took for the first one to happen.
Notice we’re not working with Medians anymore, as I think they’re not so accurate as engineering teams need. The 75th and 95th percentiles are much precise and appropriate for modern software development.
The chart provides useful information on the healthiness of the Code Review process. If the team takes too much time to interact with a pull request, managers should promote practices to engage and ship code faster.
Engineering Metric Future
As I said, the future is uncertain, and priority may change. But it’s clear to us that we need to capture more work into the Engineering Metrics.
Currently, we provide a view of Pull Requests and Merge Requests dynamics. However, we plan to start measuring the commit and the deploy. It means we want to cover the full Engineering workflow.
Embracing both turns SourceLevel into the perfect solution for providing State of DevOps’ metrics, as it will provide two out of the most crucial measurements: Deploy Frequency (Throughput) and Lead Time for Changes. But it’s a topic for another article.
Curious to see how these numbers reflect on your organization?
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Co-founder and CEO of SourceLevel. Previously co-founder of Plataformatec.
Loves to talk about software engineering, Elixir, coffee, mechanical keyboards, multitools and his 3 big dogs.