How to drive a 2x increase in engineering delivery velocity  

You’ve been following all the main agile best practices with enthusiasm. Check.

Retrospectives, daily stand-ups, and careful sprint planning are all in place. Check, check, and check. Your engineers? They’re fantastic! Check. Plus, you’re working with the best tools available to your knowledge. Check! 

But still. You still find your team bogged down in projects that drag on longer than expected. Ouch. 

What’s happening here? 

Before you blame your engineers, there may be several factors at play here. 

There might be bottlenecks you have not noticed, if you don’t have a full (single pane of glass) overview of your development processes. Or it may well be that some of your tools don’t play well together, or that legacy manual processes get in the way. Or that it’s simply not one straight answer but a set of linked factors that might be affecting your team’s pace or the standard of your products.  

More likely, it’s a set of linked factors that might be affecting your team’s pace or the standard of your products. 

The ability to deliver digital products quickly, consistently, and efficiently can mean the difference between staying ahead of the competition and falling behind.  

So, how can your teams deliver software products quicker, i.e., increase their delivery velocity, while maintaining the same high quality? And, improving the developer experience, for that matter. 

This blog explores how you can increase your delivery velocity with specific strategies and shares best practices for measuring and improving delivery velocity. We’ll also delve into how a self-service platform can transform your development processes. 

What’s engineering delivery velocity?  

(Engineering) delivery velocity is a crucial metric in software development, used to measure how much work a team can complete within a specific period, usually a sprint in agile methodologies.  

It provides insights into a team’s capacity, efficiency, and productivity. Measuring delivery velocity helps organizations plan more effectively, identify bottlenecks, and optimize their resources. 

But what should you do if you start seeing issues with development speed at your company? We’ll share some helpful tips here.  

Why should you care about your delivery velocity? 

Delivery velocity is crucial for team leaders, engineering managers, and CTOs because it’s a great way to plan effectively. By using it, you can make delivery schedules more reliable, help the company determine project priorities, set goals, and manage customer or user expectations. 

Think of velocity as work accomplished over time. A higher velocity means your team can achieve more goals within a specific period. 

What’s more, delivery velocity serves as a useful indicator for identifying problems within the organization. Just remember, it shouldn’t be the only tool you use to gauge the overall efficiency of your engineering operations. 

Increasing delivery velocity brings substantial benefits to development teams and organizations alike.  

Added bonuses for an increased delivery velocity include… 

1. Enhanced agility: Faster delivery enables teams to adapt quickly to market changes and customer feedback. 

2. Higher customer satisfaction: Quicker releases mean that customer needs and demands are met faster, improving overall satisfaction. 

3. Increased revenue: By delivering products more rapidly, organizations can capitalize on market opportunities and generate revenue sooner. 

4. Improved team morale: Teams that see their hard work quickly translated into tangible results often experience higher job satisfaction and morale. 

What’s standing in your way of increasing delivery velocity? 

Several factors can negatively impact delivery velocity within a development team, such as: 

• Manual processes: Labor-intensive tasks slow down development. 

• Lack of standardization: Inconsistent practices lead to inefficiencies and errors. 

• Technical debt: Accumulated technical debt can bog down teams with maintenance and rework. 

• Resource constraints: Limited access to necessary resources and tools hamper productivity. 

• Poor communication: Miscommunication and lack of alignment between teams can cause delays. 

How can you measure your delivery velocity? 

1. Lead time: Measuring delivery velocity requires tracking the average span of time it takes from the time a product feature requirement enters the product backlog to when it is delivered to production. The lead time metric tracks the overall time to deliver an increment of software from initial idea through to a live production environment. 

2. Deployment frequency: Deployment frequency is a key indicator of an organization’s capacity to rapidly deliver value. Critical to Agile’s goal of rapid and continuous software delivery is the ability to quickly develop and implement small software changes. This metric tracks that proficiency and is essential for directing effort throughout the delivery organization. 

3. Delivered story points: Delivered story points can be a tricky metric because the calculation of story points and the effort they represent are not always consistent. However, as a basic measure of output and trend over time, it is valuable for alignment. While there are concerns that teams might manipulate story points, experienced observers who understand the team should view these metrics in context. Success isn’t about a large number of story points but about consistency. 

A metrics-driven strategy for enhancing agile delivery efficiency can be highly effective. By focusing on these metrics, teams can boost both their speed and frequency of deployment. 

What about delivery cycle time and quality? 

Some engineering leaders use delivery cycle time (rather than delivery velocity) as their preferred benchmark for measuring engineering team performance and effectiveness in delivering value to customers.   

The rationale being that delivery cycle time focuses on measuring the time it takes to start and finish an individual development task, involves a shorter timeframe (usually hours or days), and is therefore a more predictable and objective unit of measurement.   

This contrasts with the story point-based unit of measurement used for measuring delivery velocity (usually in weeks) and is considered subjective because of the potential variability involved in estimating story points. 

Cycle time serves a key purpose in helping to more readily identify bottlenecks and areas of improvement in the development process that can lead to faster and more efficient development cycles.  Delivery velocity on the other hand is invaluable in helping teams improve their ability to estimate future sprints more accurately. 

The question really is whether an engineering team is well served by adopting just one of those metrics instead of both.  The answer should be both in all cases. 

Another important question is what value there is in a team achieving a perceived view of excellent cycle time and delivery velocity but the tasks being executed are mostly related to fixing bugs?  Great customer value and experience can only be realized with quality software delivery to production.  

To ensure the delivery velocity and cycle time metrics reflect real value being delivered to customers, another key metric that needs to be tracked is escaped defects. This measures software bugs or errors that are discovered (and/or reported by customers) after a software product has been released to production but were not found during testing and quality assurance. 

By tracking and collectively analyzing delivery velocity, cycle time and quality metrics, a balanced view of the software development process is attained to support a powerful continuous improvement cycle at the team level. 

How can you spot an issue with your delivery velocity? 

To spot problems with engineering velocity, as an engineering leader, it’s important to examine the organization as a whole.  

Consider these questions: 

• Are frequent disruptions like meetings, assisting engineers, and urgent code reviews common? 

• Do you find yourself needing to revisit requirements for further clarification due to unclear edge cases, unexpected design challenges, missing requirements, or scope creep? 

• Are there resources missing that could accelerate development, such as better documentation, clean code, improved architecture, advanced tools, or faster computers? 

• Is progress frequently delayed because of dependence on another team or department? 

• Are there obstacles due to a lack of agreement within your team, such as vague architectural guidelines or missing standardized templates, not being on the same page, or disagreements on how tasks should be executed? 

• Does the organization make engineering more difficult by factors like a long-standing backlog of tech debt, no allocated time to update dependencies, restrictions on using new components or architecture, or an imbalance with too many juniors needing attention from limited seniors or leads? 

• Is there noticeable disengagement or lack of motivation among engineers during meetings? 

4 top tips to improve your delivery velocity 

1. Automation 

Automation plays a crucial role in boosting delivery velocity. Nearly every phase in the product development cycle can gain from automation. This could range from a fully integrated DevSecOps continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline that automatically builds, tests, and deploys code, to straightforward instance provisioning using infrastructure as code. 

By automating repetitive tasks such as testing, deployment, and integration, teams can significantly reduce manual effort and minimize errors.  

Implementing automated testing ensures that code changes are continuously validated, catching bugs early and reducing time-consuming back-and-forths. Implementing an effective CI/CD pipeline automation fosters rapid iterations and quick feedback loops.  

This leads to faster release cycles and allows developers to focus on writing high-quality code rather than getting bogged down in manual processes. 

2. Reusability 

Developing reusable components and modules is instrumental in enhancing delivery velocity. By creating a library of well-documented, reusable API services, composable modules, and embeddable code libraries, teams can avoid reinventing the wheel for every new project.  

This promotes faster development times as developers can quickly integrate pre-existing, tested components into their projects. Reusability also contributes to higher consistency across projects, ensuring that similar functionalities behave uniformly. Moreover, leveraging reusable components and code can improve software quality, as these components are refined and optimized over time. 

 3. Policy-based standardization 

Policy-based standardization and automated enforcement provide guardrails that are essential for maintaining a streamlined development process. By establishing clear guidelines and protocols for development activities, teams can ensure that best practices are consistently adhered to. Standardization reduces variability, as all team members follow the same procedures and use the same tools, which minimizes the chance of errors.  

This predictability fosters more efficient workflows, as developers spend less time troubleshooting inconsistent practices and more time focused on innovation. Standardization also aids in onboarding new team members, as clear documentation and optimized automated processes facilitate a smoother transition. 

 4. Effective measurement 

To improve delivery velocity, teams first need to improve visibility into their DevOps performance by collecting data from relevant development tools to produce and analyze engineering metrics. 

Accurate measurement of delivery velocity is crucial for continuous improvement. Use tools and templates tailored to your development process to track how much work a team completes in a given timeframe – specifically focusing on how often a team delivers new features, fixes, and updates to users (deployment frequency), and the average time lapse between the identification of a requirement and its deployment to production (delivery lead times).  

Regularly analyze this data to identify patterns and areas for improvement. Historical data serves as a valuable benchmark for setting realistic goals and tracking progress over time.  

By understanding delivery velocity trends, teams can make informed decisions about resource allocation, anticipate potential bottlenecks, and adjust strategies accordingly to enhance overall productivity and efficiency.  

Calibo’s platform supports all of the above, read on further down in this blog to learn how.  

Other best practice tips 

• Set clear expectations: Make sure everyone in the team understands the overall vision and what quality code entails. Otherwise, time can be wasted on unnecessary tasks. Ensure there is complete alignment between the product owners and your engineering team regarding the defined project scope and feature requirements that need to be delivered, and by when.  

• Remove non-essential steps: Is each development and delivery process step still needed with your current strategy for delivering software? Could it be that some steps are remnants from old procedures that are no longer required? 

• Move tasks earlier: The costliest and most disruptive time to discover a software problem is late in the process. Carry out control measures as early as you can and weave them into the development workflow. For example, you can refine your requirements process so that the testing objectives met by engineers concurrently offer the documentation needed by your compliance team. 

• Functional teams: Teams of 4 to 8 members provide an ideal structure. For larger organizations, hire the necessary number of engineers and organize them into multiple small, cross-functional teams guided by a team lead. A focused team of 6 developers is more efficient than a larger group of 10 who lack awareness of each other’s activities. 

• Thorough testing: Automated testing is essential to engineering. Teams depend on it to ensure their software meets the quality standards expected by customers and stakeholders. Think of automated testing as an investment to avoid future unexpected costs. By using automated tests at every step and ensuring test script execution is included in CI/CD pipelines, your team can detect and fix bugs before the software is released. This approach also frees up your engineers to focus on more critical decisions instead of just bug-catching. 

• Show engineers the impact of their work: When engineers feel unmotivated, it’s often due to a lack of connection with the project’s results. Software developers seek meaningful tasks, and if they don’t see their work’s impact, they can become disconnected. To inspire your team to fully engage, lead in a way that highlights the significance of the value being delivered. 

Practical example: doubling delivery velocity with Calibo 

Calibo’s self-service platform exemplifies how automation, reusability, and standardization can combine to dramatically improve delivery velocity.  It provides a single pane of glass overview of full projects, identifying any bottlenecks and needs. 

Let’s explore a case study to illustrate this. 

1. Self-service enablement and automated workflows 

Calibo integrated automated CI/CD pipelines together with self-service environment provisioning and deployments – reducing manual intervention and boosting delivery frequency by 38%. 

2. Reusable components 

The platform enabled reusable technology-specific templates to be created for source code repo auto-generation and CI/CD pipeline automation. This allowed the development team to create and share reusable components in a centrally accessible catalog. As a result, development time was cut to about half of the usual time for new projects.  

This ultimately allowed the team to focus more on innovation and quicker problem-solving, as their resources were now freed up significantly.  

3. Policy-based standardization 

With fully compliant policy templates and guardrails, Calibo ensured that all teams adhered to standardized best practices across the development lifecycle, reducing errors and increasing efficiency. 

Outcome 

Within six months of implementing Calibo’s platform, the company saw a remarkable 89% increase in delivery velocity. They were able to release product features quicker and more often, adapt to market changes more swiftly, and meet customer expectations consistently.  

The development team’s morale also improved, leading to more innovative solutions and higher productivity, when measured over the six-month period.  

See how Calibo improves delivery velocity here (in our downloadable factsheet), along with our process. 

Conclusion 

Doubling your digital product delivery velocity is not just a lofty goal—it’s an achievable reality with the right strategies and tools.  

By focusing on automation, reusability, and standardization, and leveraging platforms like Calibo, organizations can overcome the typical challenges that slow down development and accelerate their time-to-market. 

Ready to double your delivery velocity?  

Discover how Calibo can empower your development teams with the tools and capabilities needed to accelerate your digital product delivery. Learn more here.