Using LinearB to deliver software faster

LinearB introduced a new, essential tool for dev teams to ship faster with higher quality. Correlating Git and project management data, LinearB delivers dashboards, reports, and real-time alerts of how teams actually work to predict and eliminate project delays, remediate high-risk code, remove cycle bottlenecks, illuminate shadow work and ensure focus on high-priority tasks.

“Something is broken with how software projects are delivered. While Git and CI/CD tools have adopted a dev-first approach, project management and engineering efficiency tools have a top-down mindset and actually make life harder for developers,” said Ori Keren, co-founder, and CEO of LinearB. “Dev teams need tools that live in their workflow, reduce manual work and help them focus on building and improving. Think of Software Delivery Intelligence as Git correlation and reconstruction technology that makes project management updates redundant, with team metrics and operational insights built-in.”

LinearB addresses challenges dev teams face today:

• Project Management Tools are good for planning but don’t add value once dev teams start building. They are unable to understand progress without manual status updates and fail when it comes to developer specific work happening in branches, pull requests and releases.
   
• Efficiency & Value Stream Tools miss the target of opening the engineering ‘black box’ because the metrics are not actionable. They also fail to gain adoption within the team because of the “big brother” cultural impact and the temptation to use executive dashboards to micromanage dev team activities.
   
• LinearB automatically constructs and visualizes detailed progress timelines for open project issues with zero manual inputs and synchronizes updates to project systems eliminating costly developer interruptions. The platform automates the collection and display of team and project performance data that typically takes data engineers hours to compile manually.
   
• Developers get insight about their work where they live in Slack and Git,  dev team leads get clear visibility from the first-ever project board with a full Git activity timeline for every issue, and VPs of Engineering get actionable team-based metrics that empower daily improvement.

The result is a new data-driven approach to building and delivering software, and using LinearB to deliver software faster:

• Better decision-making: LinearB flags which teams and projects need help so dev leaders know where their time and attention can do the most good each day.
   
• Faster delivery: Teams are alerted in real-time to project risks, delays, and dependencies so they can course-correct and deliver more features faster.
   
• Improved visibility: Dev leaders now have metrics for team performance, efficiency, quality, and focus areas providing clarity about what to work on, when to hire and where to invest in automation.
   
• Better communication: Metrics are the language of business leaders. LinearB visualizes the most important team-based metrics like Cycle Time to help translate engineering to non-technical executives.
   
• Meaningful meetings: LinearB provides data-driven dashboards for stand-up, retro, sprint planning and release planning meetings ensuring conversations are fact-based and time is used efficiently.
   
• Asynchronous development: LinearB gives everyone real-time visibility into projects without the need for manual updates, interruptions or status meetings, empowering hybrid remote teams to work async.

“LinearB connects the dots between our Git activity and project issues giving our team greater context into the work we’re doing every day and helping us deliver more efficiently,” said Brent Bartlett, VP of Engineering at Grin. “I use the team performance reports to keep the pulse of our remote team. They’re generated automatically which eliminates hours I used to spend manually collecting data from all of our different sources.”

Building a community of progressive software development leaders

To help dev leaders adopt this new way of working, LinearB hosts a community called Dev Interrupted consisting of a Discord chat server, podcast, and weekly newsletter.
Chris Downard, VP of Engineering at GigSmart, LinearB customer and Dev Interrupted community moderator said “I love the Dev Interrupted Discord. Every day there’s super smart dev leaders sharing ideas and helping each other improve.”

LinearB is free forever for individual teams. To sign-up, visit the button below.