NewStore uses Sleuth daily to get more out of DORA metrics

If you know DORA metrics, you want a tool that knows them, too.

Carlos Rosão, Director of Software Engineering at NewStore, wanted to get more out of DORA metrics to get more visibility into team health. But doing so had to be easy.

“We could be the ones building and measuring the DORA metrics ourselves,” he says, “but doing that would be hard. I didn’t want to invest our time in building something that is not our core business.”

Sleuth fit the bill and integrated with the tools NewStore already uses, allowing them to keep their toolchain.

Carlos says:

“Sleuth is very valuable and plays an important part when it comes to improving our ways of working on a day to day basis.”

Here's more on how Carlos' team uses Sleuth.

NewStore highlights

Key needs

• Track DORA metrics by deployment for accuracy
• Encourage positive team behaviors by way of DORA metrics
• Improve Mean Time to Recovery
• Optimize existing resources in an unstable market

Key results

• Introduced best practices: trunk-based development and continuous deployment pipelines
• Improved software quality and DORA metrics, notably MTTR
• Enhanced team collaboration through work in progress visibility
• Identified bottlenecks to improve daily operations

Tool stack

• Kubernetes, Platinum Go, React, GitLab, Jira, PagerDuty

Teams for the win

Carlos saw positive impacts quickly with Sleuth. NewStore has multiple teams contributing to a repository belonging to another team. Using Sleuth's Team metrics, they are able to track deployments from teams independent of the repository they contribute to.

A number of teams also adopted trunk-based development and introduced a continuous deployment pipeline — practices that improve quality and speed of software delivery. They were able to do that because Sleuth gives them the visibility they need to be more confident with what they’re doing.

As an added and quantifiable benefit, the visibility into health Sleuth provides allowed the team to resolve incidents faster, which reduced their MTTR and consequently the cost of downtime.

Upleveling ways of working

In standups, Carlos’ team used to go through Jira tickets to see what’s in progress, how long it’s been in progress, and how that compares to average cycle time.

Sleuth's new Work in Progress feature allowed devs to talk pull requests instead of Jira tickets and help each other out.

Work in Progress gives visibility into in-flight pull requests and helps teams identify risks where work might be veering off track from rolling averages they’ve established through measuring DORA metrics.

“It was very valuable to us,” Carlos says of Work in Progress. “It allowed us to clean up some old pull requests that had been open for a long time and no one had noticed them.”

The teams also use open pull requests as an opportunity to help each other out.

“If there's an open pull request that someone else is working on, before starting something new, I actually speak with this person and understand if they need help,” Carlos says.

“Having this visibility of work in progress brought more collaboration in the teams and more understanding of helping each other resolve possible blockers.”

Why Sleuth now?‍

The way NewStore uses Sleuth is a classic example of how we give devs the power to make improvements and see the impact for themselves, which builds a continuous improvement culture.

And when the market is unstable and hiring ability is questionable, that culture is critical.

“One of our goals today is being able to make the teams stable and more productive, because we know that next month might be kind of hard when it comes to hiring new people,” Carlos says. “So we’re trying to make sure we can optimize what we have.”

Sleuth does that by giving NewStore input to where possible blockers are, which encourages communication and helps the team get to optimal states of their working practices.