November 2021 Summaries

The text discusses tips for improving the efficiency of pull requests in software development. It suggests measuring the time taken for pull requests using tools like Pull Request Analytics or Sleuth, and focusing on the biggest bottleneck. Tips include assigning one or two people to review a pull request, considering technical and domain expertise when assigning reviewers, automating small tasks such as code formatting and import ordering, writing tech specs for significant changes, keeping pull requests small, taking debates offline, automating deployment, and automating merging. The author emphasizes that pull requests don't have to be a painful process and can be made more efficient with these strategies.

In this text, Don Brown discusses his experience using Sleuth, a tool that tracks DORA metrics such as deployment frequency and change failure rate. He explains how these metrics are not goals in themselves but rather tools to measure progress towards creating an optimal developer and customer experience. As the company grows and the cost of failure increases, they plan to focus more on the change failure rate and mean time to recovery. The key takeaway is that metrics should be used as a means to evaluate progress towards a desired experience, rather than setting goals solely based on improving the metrics themselves.