Pau Revilla, CTO of Factorial, leads a fast-growing, globally distributed engineering organization. Senior Engineering Director Josep Jaume Rey works in the Developer Experience team and is responsible for analyzing engineering outcomes and improving the daily lives of Factorial’s developers.
In 2022 alone, the Factorial engineering organization grew from 80 to 150 software developers. When Pau and Josep started looking to gain visibility into the growing organization and its bottlenecks, it was important that the tool would support their culture of ownership and accountability.
Pau had previously been using Pull Panda for lightweight analytics on the teams’ pull request lifecycle. But after Pull Panda was acquired by GitHub, rebranded as Pull Reminders, and eventually deprecated, he felt there was a gap in the market for a tool that would help them eliminate bottlenecks in their delivery lifecycle.
Additionally, Pau and Josep were interested in getting access to DORA metrics and giving both managers and individual contributors the insights and tools they need to make better decisions.
Solution: actionable insights for managers and individual contributors
Factorial’s first objective with Swarmia was to gain visibility into their pull request lifecycle. As with many growing teams, they quickly noticed that code reviews were becoming a bottleneck.
Almost 80% of Factorial’s engineering teams have subscribed to Swarmia’s Daily Digests in Slack, which summarize the team’s open pull requests and any exceptions to the Working Agreements they’ve adopted. Josep also keeps receiving positive feedback about Swarmia’s personal Slack notifications from engineers across the organization.
Some of the more mature teams at Factorial have also started using Swarmia to track DORA metrics. While a wider rollout hasn’t been possible yet due to the organization’s rapid growth, Josep is hoping to gradually roll them out in the coming months.
Results: 2x throughput, improved code review rate, and faster merge time
In their first year of using Swarmia, the Factorial engineering organization managed to more than double their throughput, which is rare for a company growing as fast as Factorial has been. After all, it’s difficult to maintain, let alone improve, productivity while spending a lot of time on hiring and onboarding new teammates.
After adopting Swarmia’s GitHub notifications in Slack, Factorial’s overall code review rate has increased from 74% to 95%. They’ve also managed to drop the average time for first code review from 12 hours to 10 hours and reduce merge time from 24 to 15 hours, which are impressive results for a globally distributed team.
In addition to the concrete and measurable improvements Josep has seen in the engineering organization, he’s been particularly happy with Swarmia’s ability to deliver new features.
Next up, Josep and Pau are focusing on improving performance, stability, and quality with the help of Swarmia. Josep is also hoping to do an organization-wide rollout of DORA metrics now that some teams have had a chance to try them out.
