Code Climate

Boaz had no way of measuring the ROI on the R&D department he was leading.

Bizzabo’s technical co-founder Boaz Katz was put in charge of the engineering department. He was expected to evaluate and improve ROI of research and development. The entire leadership team was looking to learn whether they were moving as efficiently as they should be.

Boaz had a good gut feeling about the R&D department. “I had a hunch that the team was very efficient, and I wanted to prove it. I wanted to set an example for the other teams and show off to leadership how we were doing.”

Boaz, who came from a product background, started learning all the best practices of measuring engineering speed. He looked at planning vs. execution, burndown charts, story points and time estimation-- but he felt like nothing was giving him a clear answer. He was shocked to find that engineering, as a discipline, didn’t have reliable metrics.

“I couldn’t convince myself that there was a direct correlation between performance and these measurements. Sometimes the sprint felt slow but we were easily hitting all the targets.”

The Solution

Velocity helped Boaz measure and improve the rate of innovation.

Boaz started using Velocity, because the tool measures engineering speed based on a concrete metrics. Boaz tells us, “If your engineering team has a standard around pushing small Pull Requests, then Velocity’s metrics become objective measures of how much your team is getting done.”

Boaz looked at Pull Requests Merged per team and realized that his R&D team was one of the fastest in the organization. He tells us, “The visibility is amazing. Velocity showed how well we were doing but showed us there are still lots more opportunities to be more efficient.”

Boaz found that sharing these metrics with the team incentivized really positive work habits, from the individual to the team, to the organization. As a result, Boaz said “my team developed a winning attitude and were eager to find ways to get even faster.” Within the first year of using Velocity, they boosted their Pull Request Throughput 95%.

I tried everything in the industry: planning vs. execution, burndown charts, story points, time estimation. Finally, Velocity opened my mind.

Boaz Katz

Co-founder and Chief Data Officer, Bizzabo

Results

Data drives concrete improvement.

95% increase in Pull Request Throughput.

54% decrease in Pull Request Size.

76% decrease in Cycle Time

Boaz scrapped his existing KPIs around deviation from planning and started setting benchmarks according to Velocity metrics. Rather than looking at planning vs. execution, tasks per day and uptime, he started tracking pull request throughput, pull request size, reverts and rework (how often a contributor edits recently merged code.)

Favorite Reports

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Bizzabo boosted R&D innovation 95%.

The Challenge