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Hello Product Hunters,
We've been using Velocity for 10 days as a GitPrime replacement. In those 10 days, we managed to resolve all our long outstanding PRs, integrated Velocity into our sprint reviews, used Velocity in quarterly feedback sessions and use it to keep a pulse on the engineering team at all times. In those 10 days, Velocity released new features (Dashboard, Teams), went GA at Code Climate Summit 2018 and has followed up to my numerous feedback and questions through Intercom.
The most striking is how much the team at Code Climate believes in the value that Velocity can bring to an engineering team. The first telltale sign was the fact that I got a demo of Velocity's features by looking at the engineering team's performance at Velocity using Velocity. Talk about eating your own dogfood. Given that we've been longtime users of a similar tool, the most important for me was to see what sets Velocity apart.
Velocity revolves around PRs as the unit of work.
If your engineering team's output does not revolve around PRs and a workflow that emphasizes peer review and iterative collaboration, Velocity will be of limited to no use to you. That doesn't mean that Velocity is useless, quite the opposite. It means that neither you, as a manager, neither your team and its individual members have visibility or checks and balances in place. If you can accept and adopt this engineering culture, you should sign up for Velocity to bring transparency and unbiased, fact-based metrics that can be used to drive your team towards more efficient, productive work.
Velocity is the kind of tool that works best if you can live in it. Daily stand-up reports, immediate notifications for risky PRs help with that and help identify problems early on. Massive PR that everybody's reluctant to review? Check. Unpatched PR after first round of reviews? Check. Too many review cycles? Check. At the end of the day, the actionable stuff is the only thing that matters and Velocity seems to nudge everyone towards the right direction without having to be authoritative.
Velocity brings a set of values that is easy for the whole team to sign up for.
I always tell our engineers that if you don't commit and push, it's as if you did not work that day. Those who write code for a living, need to have output in the form of commits that represent the cognitive steps they've taken from from problem to solution.
Commit, push, and open PRs early and often.
Velocity is ultimately a tool to communicate the best engineering practices when it comes to collaboration within agile teams.
