How to Keep Your Pipelines Clear and Avoid Delivery Bottlenecks

Delivery bottlenecks are an excruciatingly painful foe for development teams. According to Ori Keren, co-founder & CEO of LinearB, it’s high time we highlight the top bottlenecks that occur during the development process and learn how to fix them. 

Overcoming delivery bottlenecks is often a costly and resource-consuming practice. One of the most effective ways to identify bottlenecks in your software development process is to start by breaking down your cycle time. There are generally four major phases involved with the cycle time for developers:

1. Initial coding time
2. Pull request issued
3. Review cycles
4. Code merges

When defining software delivery bottlenecks in the dev process, it’s important to look at each of these phases in the development pipeline individually. While they all add up to your whole cycle time, it’s best to identify spots for improvement and set team goals during sprint planning or retrospective. 

Pro Tip: Each of these four phases can be broken down into smaller, more actionable steps that allow you to analyze where a bottleneck occurs and when during the development phase, your team can pay more attention to meet a goal. 

To sum it up, monitor your actual software performance and identify the factors preventing your team from operating at maximum capacity. 

Learn More: Realizing the Full Potential of Artificial Intelligence and Automation

Cycle Time Is of the Essence

Cycle time may be the most important team metric, but tracking it is a critical iteration step for team leaders. In many cases, you will get the 80/20 effect, where you will do a small initiative, and you’ll see considerable improvement, but continuously improving from that point can become a challenge. For instance, some teams take their review time from six days to 36 hours in a short period of time. This is because it’s really easy to make large improvements in the first week. However, trying to take it from 36 hours to 10 minutes becomes a much more demanding task. 

In order to take your cycle time to the next level, you need to avoid looking at the mean and median numbers of each service or each team. Instead, find the outliers and dig into fixing those instances. Your team needs to have a continuous improvement mindset where they are never fully happy. Obviously, celebrating small victories is very important, but never being fully satisfied will take your team to the next level.

The three basic steps to improve cycle time are:

1. Identify the cycle time phase that needs improvement
2. Review the baseline data with your team and set goals for improvement
3. Celebrate small wins but keep a restless mindset

Another key to recognizing bottleneck indicators is to have the proper infrastructure to measure and analyze the data. The idea of measuring your pipeline is an emerging trend as more companies and dev teams are looking to prevent bottlenecks and increase productivity.

There are a variety of metrics you can choose to analyze when looking at your pipeline, but the three critical measurements you need to be aware of are:

1. Pull requests: Is your team taking care of one another? Are they actively stepping up and assisting where bottlenecks are a risk?
2. Deployment frequency: Does your team have a regular cadence of delivery, whether externally for customers or internally for review? Does your team also maintain a consistent schedule as opposed to a sprint approach?
3. PR size: Are you assessing this as an indicator of your team’s ability to take a large story and break it down into smaller, manageable pieces? Ultimately, this is a reflection of good leadership and productivity within your team.

These metrics can serve as the basis for many things. Once you start measuring and have this visibility, a dev team can start detecting where it’s stuck within a pipeline. Once a bottleneck is identified, it’s essential to pull together as a team and not single anyone out. The team will organically know how to help individual team members that are having trouble.

Learn More: How Product Lifecycle Management Is Driving Innovation in the F&B Industry

Dev Culture Builds the Process

There’s a saying that “your KPIs will define your culture” which is an important way to approach the development process. If you have KPIs that are unattainable or prioritize individual productivity over team efficiency, you are likely to end up with more bottlenecks and unhappy developers.

Daily standups with dev teams and monthly or bi-weekly retrospectives to analyze the pipeline and pinpoint various bottlenecks can be critical to long-term success. Trying to understand dev team challenges and addressing their concerns is as crucial as a pipeline’s success.

What can your developers do if they don’t have the right data or the tool they are using doesn’t record the data you are looking for? Encourage them to write comments back into their Git system because the more things that are logged, the more that they can be attributed to team members for continuous feedback. Additionally, writing these comments back into Git organically builds one of the best knowledge bases and creates an incredibly powerful resource for any team moving forward. 

Managing cycle time along with bottleneck prevention will inevitably take its toll on a development team, which is why it’s vital to keep an eye out for burnout indicators:

1. A high WIP: This is self-explanatory, but if anyone is struggling and near burning out, you’ll often see work piling up with very little progress occurring on existing requests.
2. Working too much: If someone is working all hours of the day during the week and then into the weekends, you know it is unsustainable. If someone is pushing commits out on Saturday or Sunday consistently over three weeks or more, team leaders need to step in and conduct a check-in.
Ask them to actively disconnect themselves from work. It’s a good practice to encourage a distraction from time to time and utilize days off to rest. This is far more important than completing a weekend commitment and will reduce stress and improve their work-life balance long term.
3. Type of work: People will burnout if they’re constantly fighting fires. If they cannot work on things they are passionate about, free them up to do so. Often, these issues can surface faster than you can track manually, so be aware.

Burnout prevention should be a priority for every manager because it not only keeps your developers and your team as a whole happy but will significantly improve the delivery process and prevent any potential burnout-related bottlenecks from occurring.

The art of preventing software delivery bottlenecks starts with the right philosophy, knowing what analysis metrics to use, and a holistic approach to the development process. 

What else would you like to add to the do’s and don’ts? Let us know your thoughts in the comment section below or on LinkedInOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , or FacebookOpens a new window . We would love to hear from you!