How MongoDB Reduced PR Review Times by up to 54% with GitDailies

MongoDB is the world’s leading modern database. Their engineers are constantly working to enhance it, and they open, review, and merge thousands of GitHub Pull Requests every week.

MongoDB’s Challenge

To meet tight deadlines it’s important that PRs are handled in a timely manner. MongoDB teams have an SLA (Service Level Agreement) that PR reviews will happen at most 24 hours after being requested. For some teams, this is as low as 4 hours.

Unfortunately, they found that existing alerting solutions were not working well. It wasn’t possible to tailor the alert time, trigger conditions and notifications to each team’s needs.

This meant engineers were missing review requests and PRs were getting delayed. Moreover, it was hard to tell if performance was improving or getting worse over time.

The GitDailies Solution

MongoDB’s Director of Engineering, Alexander Neben discovered that GitDailies had the features they needed:

• Highly customisable alerts for PR reviews and stale PRs (amongst many others). Each team could define alerts with completely custom time limits, trigger conditions, and notifications.
• Slack integration, including automatic @mentions of the responsible person so they receive a personal notification.
• PR and Review metrics to visualise performance over time.
• Quality of life features such as personalised daily dashboards for each engineer and team, and optionally “stopping the clock” for time-based alerts at weekends.

Getting Started

After a demo of GitDailies and discussion to explore their needs, Alexander and his team decided to move forward with a trial. MongoDB carried out a thorough review of the GitDailies system and gave the go-ahead for the trial to begin.

The only setup required was to install the GitDailies App and choose which GitHub repos to follow. GitDailies is powered by your organization’s GitHub data, so historical metrics are automatically populated, and alerts are immediately available.

During the trial period, Alexander and his team at MongoDB worked closely with GitDailies founder, Patrick O’Brien, to ensure that GitDailies supported MongoDB’s workflows and handled the needs of their different teams.

GitDailies is one of the most customer obsessed vendors we work with.

They are responsive, add killer features, have clear communication, and manage a lot of different folks in MongoDB asking for a lot of different things while keeping everyone happy.

Alexander Neben - Director of Engineering at MongoDB

Accelerating Teams

The trial was a success and GitDailies was happy to welcome MongoDB on board as a customer.

Now MongoDB engineers are automatically alerted in Slack (or email) for waiting PR review requests or stale PRs. Each team tailors their alert triggers and notifications according to their specific needs using the powerful “Expression Builder”. Each engineer also receives a personalized “daily dashboard” summarizing the status of their open PRs, waiting review requests, and any personal alerts they have set up.

One major team saw review times drop by 54% and almost half the teams saw an improvement greater than 28%. These metrics (along with many others) can be tracked in the GitDailies Metrics Explorer. Identifying and comparing trends is easy, with the ability to aggregate statistics by any combination of team, repo, user, or PR label.

In addition to improved metrics, the alerts and daily summaries brought peace of mind to the engineers and managers. Far less time is spent manually chasing PR reviews, and the personal daily dashboards reassure engineers that they are up to date with their work.

It is a pleasure working with Alexander and the team at MongoDB. They are world-class software engineers, which has led to some truly insightful feedback and feature requests.

What’s more, their enthusiasm and energy is highly appreciated.

Patrick O'Brien - Founder at GitDailies

Looking Ahead

GitDailies is looking forward to further collaboration with MongoDB, and supporting their engineers to move even faster with shipping the world’s leading modern database.