The Challenge: Slower Release Cycles Hindering Growth

Credrails, a leading fintech platform connecting banks, mobile money services, and offline data, needed to improve its speed of delivering new updates and features. In a competitive market, releasing updates slowly meant missing out on key opportunities.

“Before making changes, we needed to truly understand where the bottlenecks were in our process. That’s why we brought in DevDynamics.”  - James W., CTO at Credrails

Uncovering the Problem: Where is the engineering time going?

After connecting their tech stack (GitHub, Jira, and Slack), DevDynamics provided Credrails with clear data on their development process. The Cycle Time Dashboard revealed a troubling trend: their cycle times were lagging, well below industry benchmarks. This prompted the team to dig deeper into their processes to find the source of the delays.

Bottleneck Identified: Merge Times Slowing Everything Down

The deep dive showed that Merge Time, the time it took for code to be reviewed and merged, was the biggest bottleneck. DevDynamics highlighted key issues:

• Too many work-in-progress (WIP) items created delays.
• Unmerged code piling up: Significant delays occurred as team members took ample time to thoroughly review the code.
• Skewed reviewer distribution: was responsible for most of the delay in code review.

The Solution: Expanding Code Review Capacity

Armed with these insights, Credrails took immediate action:

• They trained more developers in conducting code reviews, recognizing that it was essential for improving delivery speed and ensuring faster approvals.
• They actively monitored WIP items. Capping work-in-progress items ensured a faster review times by limiting the number of tasks each developer handled.

“Our merge times were slow because too few people were doing reviews. Fixing that made a significant difference.” - James

Results: Faster Releases, Higher Productivity

By addressing the key bottlenecks, Credrails saw significant improvements:

• With a 26% reduction in merge times, the code review process became more efficient.
• A 20% increase in deployment frequency allowed the team to release updates more frequently, with fewer bottlenecks.

Engineering Excellence with DevDynamics

Credrails’ partnership with DevDynamics gave them the data and insights they needed to make meaningful improvements to their development processes. With better management of code reviews and work-in-progress, Credrails is now able to release updates faster, ensuring they stay ahead in a competitive market.

Key Highlights:

• They identified bottlenecks in merge times, caused by overloaded reviewers and too much WIP.
• Expanded review capacity and optimized workloads to resolve those issues.
• The improvements led to 26% faster merge times and a 20% increase in deployment frequency.