NextGen Healthcare Case Study

Customer Story

With over 100 development teams and 700 developers worldwide, NextGen Healthcare serves more than 100,000 providers caring for over 65 million patients in the US.

Two years ago, the CTO of NextGen Healthcare defined a set of KPIs that were to be the focus of the engineering team in the following quarters. Articulating his goal to his team and to GitClear, he explained:

"I want to be very prescriptive on these KPIs. I want to focus on how can we improve Productivity, Efficiency and Quality."

But, to measure progress against these KPIs, the first step was to establish the existing baselines. Finding reliable, consistent development measurements is no easy feat when engineering work is scaled across 100 remote development teams.

In short, they were facing the same hurdles that almost every enterprise company faces when considering which development metrics to adopt:

• No known metric that can objectively measure progress over highly disparate operating parameters
• Data-gathering is resource-intensive and can be inconsistent
• Building a custom tool is costly, time-consuming, and likely to lack validation
• Visibility across 100 teams entails trade-offs between cost and consistency
• Data centralization and orchestration lives in a spreadsheet
• "Ease of producing" metrics is inversely related to their applicability. The most "available" metrics also the most "noisy"
• Security must be priority #1

Since building a tool from scratch was not an option, NextGen began to search for a vendor that met their requirements. NextGen needed a tool that could provide:

• An easy and reliable set of metrics to track and improve KPIs
• Fast and clear visibility that encompasses the whole organisation
• A clear and concise report for CTOs and individual managers
• Easy setup and automation
• Tangible, objective, consistent metrics
• Benchmarks that allow comparing performance against industry norms
• Analysis that can be undertaken without creating extra work for teams
• Metrics that suggest follow-on actions
• A secure system that can operate within their premises

Adoption

"We wanted managers to take control of the dev process and put together action plans."

At the start of each month, each manager had a snapshot of their team's performance over the three KPI tracked by GitClear. The initial results were promising:

Substantial increases in pull request work submitted and reviewed after GitClear adoption

Armed with compelling data, managers created Action Plans to solve the bottlenecks and inefficiencies found within the software development lifecycle. The first action target that managers identified was pull request cycle time. When PR cycle time extended beyond five days, it became a pain point that led to undesirable turnaround times.

Managers worked with their development teams to implement plans that reduced pull request size. Their efforts led to a measured 30% improvement in PRs created and merged. Over the course of 3 months, their agile teams drastically reduced their "Under Review Time" and "Under Review Work."

Team 1

Team 2

These results speak to the benefits that objective measurements can bring about toward improved performance. As the familiar adage goes: You can’t improve what you don’t measure.

A Data & Analytics Technical Program Manager at NextGen discussed some of their pull request efficiency gains with GitClear's CEO:

Organization Accomplishments

How did the move toward developer-friendly data analytics translate to measurable results?

Each individual team was empowered to take control of their processes and collaboratively deploy GitClear to address their perceived inefficiencies. Over the course of several "Office Hours" working alongside GitClear staff, gains were measured across each of the three KPIs the CTO had designated as targets.

Efficiency Gains

Clear Action Plans and consistent execution across teams can make a big impact.

Thanks to the Action Plans that NextGen managers set in motion, 80% of NexGen's development teams reported tangible results in the reduction of pull request review times. GitClear's pull request phase graph proved their progress:

Pull Request Metrics Overview

GitClear's Pull Request Stats include the oft-discussed conventional metrics like "Under Review Time" and "Cycle Time." But, beyond the ordinary metrics, GitClear paints a fuller picture, letting teams see what happens immediately after the pull request is merged. This is labeled "Post-Merge Work" in GitClear's pull request stats, and NextGen proved especially adept at minimizing the follow-on work that occurs when the PR review process gets shortchanged.

Bottom line: by using GitClear metrics to measure organization performance, NextGen succeeded at decreasing their pull request "Under Review Time" by 30% in 12 months' time.

Productivity Improvements

It should come as no surprise that more coding time leads to more things getting done.

And GitClear can let executives see exactly how many more things that Managers are pushing across the finish line.

Having a reliable metric that unveils the amount of work happening inside your repositories is a key to reproducible success. NextGen's managers began tracking their development team's coding effort with the help of GitClear's Historic Diff Delta Stats.

Historic Diff Delta stats illustrate how much work is taking place across large repos like Google's Tensorflow

Using empirically validated data from the commits within the teams' git repositories, Historic Diff Delta Stats provide an objective review of how much coding work is happening inside the organization.

Going one step further, Diff Delta Per-Contributor Stats break down how much change is happening relative to the count of active contributors.

Per-Contributor Diff Delta stats normalize developer count, to allow glimpsing how progress is trending independent of team size

NextGen made use of their newly available resources to see their Per-Contributor Diff Delta increase by 10%. In other words, each developer has contributed, on average, 10% more meaningful and impactful code than before.

And on top of that, they've experienced a huge 40% increase in their story points resolved. From a monthly average of 1,783 up to 2,503 Story Points (!).

Quality Enhancements

Keeping a close eye on the code quality is becoming increasingly important as data suggests that AI is causing more copy/pasted code than past years.

NextGen aimed to ensure that at least 10% of the development effort would be invested into expanding and maintaining test coverage. Beyond the synthetic estimations of "test coverage," GitClear allowed the team to see visual evidence that a long-term code quality focus was successfully propagated throughout the organization's software engineers.

See the percentage of code work that has gone toward adding, updating and deleting outdated tests

Each user can see a breakdown of the code written into all the code categories they're interested in. They can see their test percentage alongside "library," "view," and other code types. This can help developers pinpoint how their efficiency in front-end tasks compares to when they're working in the backend.

As of early 2024, GitClear also began offering standalone graphs that allow teams to measure the percentage of "test code" and "documentation code" relative to other developer teams in the same industry. These allow managers to ensure that long-term code quality is incentivized, alongside everyday feature and bug work.

Having easy access to this metric enabled NextGen to reach its target of 10% and continue to monitor it, keeping it between their 10-20% sweet spot.

Imbue Development with Data

NextGen's experience with GitClear proves that even large enterprise organizations can quickly steer 100+ developer teams toward realizing goals set by the executive team. Beyond that, GitClear helps individual teams and managers feel a sense of purpose and progress in the process of completing their everyday work.

Book a demo with GitClear and we can help you write your own story of a company that set and beat its annual goals.

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