Turnkey Deployment Delivers Day-One Value for Yottaa

Over the past few years, a shift in consumer behavior has supercharged e-commerce, emphasizing the importance for companies to optimize the digital experience for their customers. Increased demand has driven significant growth for e-commerce solution provider Yottaa, which now helps more than 1,500 sites achieve better performance, boosting conversions and revenue.

Behind the industry-leading e-commerce optimization platform is a growing team of engineers who prioritize efficient delivery and continuous innovation to bring value to customers. To ensure his teams have what they need to be successful, Director of Engineering Dan Biagini needs rich insight into team performance, which is impossible to acquire manually. In 2022, Yottaa reached a tipping point, leading to an easy decision to onboard with Code Climate Velocity, a Software Engineering Intelligence platform.

Purpose-built for engineering management

Biagini said the engineering organization was reinforcing its commitment to agile and closely evaluating how it worked. Concurrently, there was a company-wide push to make data-driven process improvements and implement dashboards for more consumable reporting. But with a large team and increasing demands, Biagini struggled to manually extract helpful information from existing tools and felt that building homegrown dashboards and spreadsheets was painful and time-consuming.

“Having a tool that provides deep insight into how our teams are performing is really important, and I believe Velocity is purpose-built to fulfill this need,” Biagini said.

Biagini felt that competitive products in the market were overly focused on financial reporting or lacked broad visibility. Velocity seamlessly integrates with existing tools and workflows to give a complete picture of engineering processes and performance. Armed with actionable insight, engineering leaders can easily align initiatives with strategic priorities, accelerate software delivery, and drive continuous improvement within their teams.

Turnkey deployment adds value on day one

Velocity’s turnkey deployment enabled Biagini and other engineering leaders at Yottaa to immediately begin building useful reports. Onboarding was as simple as connecting the platform to Jira and Github and leveraging the built-in reporting features to understand key metrics like Cycle Time and PR Throughput. Velocity also made it easy to share clear yet comprehensive reports and dashboards with leadership.

“It worked right out of the box. I was able to take the results and run with them immediately. I didn’t have to train a team on yet another platform or use more tools than we need,” said Biagini. “The fact that Velocity simply overlays on top of the tools we are already using and pulls out the data is just so powerful.”

With insight into engineering processes, Yottaa’s engineering teams were able to align on goals and identify bottlenecks for immediate improvement. Within three months, they decreased Cycle Time by 8% and increased PR Throughput by 10%. They also decreased PR size by 29%, which enabled faster reviews and reduced risk during PR merges. These improvements are significant because their focus in early Q1 is often getting through the deployment backlog that slows down during the holiday season to preserve platform stability.

Data-driven decision-making

Biagini said sophisticated insight into the cyclical nature of their e-commerce technology team has been an unexpected value add. The team spends October through December limiting the amount of code they push into production, often using this time to work through support requests and address technical debt. In January, deployment ramps up, impacting metrics like Cycle Time. With Velocity, it is easier to see how cyclical changes impact teams and communicate this impact to leadership.

Biagini is looking forward to leveraging the new DORA metrics capabilities within the context of other engineering metrics in the Velocity Analytics module to dig deeper into possible process improvements and identify how to make the highest-impact adjustments. He also said he sees how data from Velocity will support decisions about future development efforts, resource allocation, and expanding headcount.

“We can really map out the reality of the business and more easily communicate it to others,” Biagini said.

To learn more about how Velocity can help your organization decrease Cycle Time and increase PR throughput, speak with a product specialist.