LinearB offers A-line to kill off bad code
Question: what’s better than project management?
Answer: Invisible real-time data-driven project management, that’s what.
Holy Land and US-based LinearB plays in this arena and the company insists that it’s not focused on intelligence software delivery, as such, its core gambit is Software Delivery Intelligence.
The company’s cheeky usage of CAPS to brand a discipline that we already know is meant to tell us that its tools help ship software in a different way.
Correlating Git and project management data, LinearB delivers dashboards, reports and real-time alerts the details how teams actually work — this is meant to predict and eliminate project delays caused by all the bad (code) stuff.
What constitutes ‘bad code stuff’ then?
- Use of high-risk code that needs remediation, ratification or refactoring.
- Existence of software application development cycle bottlenecks.
- Existence of shadow code work (or ingestion of shadow apps and services which contribute towards the existence of more shadow code).
- Task management shenanigans that skew the team from focusing on high-priority tasks first.
- More of the above and other nasties too.
The company says that ‘traditional’ project management tools are good for planning, but they don’t add value once dev teams start building.
Why is LinearB so keen to ‘diss’ traditional tools?
Because, says LinearB, those older tools are unable to understand progress without manual status updates and fail when it comes to developer-specific work happening in branches, pull requests and releases.
“Something is broken with how software projects are delivered. While Git and CI/CD tools have adopted a dev-first approach, project management and engineering efficiency tools have a top-down mindset and actually make life harder for developers,” said Ori Keren, co-founder and CEO of LinearB.
“Dev teams need tools that live in their workflow, reduce manual work and help them focus on building and improving. Think of Software Delivery Intelligence as Git correlation and reconstruction technology that makes project management updates redundant, with team metrics and operational insights built-in,” he added.
Keren and team insist that ‘traditional’ efficiency & value stream tools miss the target of opening the engineering ‘black box’ because the metrics are not actionable.
Big Brother bother
They also fail to gain adoption within the team because of their Big Brother cultural impact effect and the temptation to use executive dashboards to micromanage dev team activities.
LinearB automatically constructs and visualises detailed progress timelines for open project issues with zero manual inputs and synchronises updates to project systems eliminating developer interruptions.
The platform automates the collection and display of team and project performance data that typically takes data engineers hours to compile manually.
Developers get insight about their work where they live in Slack and Git, dev team leads get clear visibility from the first-ever project board with a full Git activity timeline for every issue and engineering VPs get actionable team-based metrics that help daily improvement.
“LinearB flags which teams and projects need help so dev leaders know where their time and attention can do the most good each day. Teams are alerted in real-time to project risks, delays and dependencies so they can course-correct and deliver more features faster,” notes Keren.
As a closing assertion, LinearB claims that metrics are now the language of business leaders.
Metrics: the language of business
As such, LinearB visualises the most important team-based metrics like Cycle Time to help translate engineering to non-technical executives.
The company also provides data-driven dashboards for stand-up, retro, sprint planning and release planning meetings ensuring conversations are fact-based and time is used efficiently.
This is real-time visibility into projects without the need for manual updates, interruptions or status meetings, empowering hybrid remote teams to work asynchronously… and that reality (if nothing else in 2020) is pretty real.
