Configuration Review Preparation
1) Select the Project
Config reviews should be scoped to one project. In some cases scoping them to one larger workflow can be helpful, but some opportunities may be missed.
Top 3 reasons to select a project:
- High credit consumption
- Long workflow durations
- Overly complex configurations
2) Identify Current Pain Points
Source pain points from the people that use CircleCI in the selected project on a regular basis. The most common pain point is a high duration, which is easy to see while looking through metrics. Other common pain points are workflows being hard to on board new people to or flaky tests, which can be harder to identify through metrics.
Collecting pain points from the whole team can be a great way to find opportunities for improvement that may not have been found solely through metrics.
3) Decide Which Metrics are Important
A high duration is the most common metric of concern when doing a config review. Other metrics that often come up are success rate, mean time to recovery, flaky tests, and credit consumption. CircleCI’s Insights offers data for these metrics in the UI or via the API and is a great way to not only identify areas of concern but also ensure any changes made are having the intended impact.
Next Step: Document the Config Review
Previous Step: Self Service Configuration Review Overview