Code Integration Frequency

The average number of production-ready pull requests a team closes per day, normalized by the number of developers on the team. On a team with 5 developers, healthy CI practice is at least 5 per day.

What is the intended behavior?

• Increase the frequency of code integration
• Reduce the size of each change
• Improve code review processes
• Remove unneeded processes
• Improve quality feedback

How to improve it

• Decompose code changes into smaller units to incrementally deliver features.
• Use BDD to aid functional breakdown.
• Use TDD to design more modular code that can be integrated more frequently.
• USe feature flags, branch by abstraction, or other coding techniques to control the release of new features.

How to game it

• Meaningless changes integrated to trunk.
• Breaking changes integrated to trunk.

Guardrail Metrics

Metrics to use in combination with this metric to prevent unintended consequences.

• Quality decreases if testing is skipped.

Recommended Practices

• Trunk Based Development
• Continuous Integration
• Feature Flagging