Labs: The Evolution of Continuous Merge | DevCycle’s Nik LeBlanc

**Conor Bronsdon** (0:00)
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Discover the future of software delivery management. Visit linearb.io today and start transforming your engineering organization. Hey everyone, welcome to Dev Interrupted. This is your co-host, Conor Bronsdon, and joining me today, I have two incredible folks. I have, helping me co-host, Ben Lloyd Pearson. Ben, welcome in.

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (1:33)
Yeah, thank you, absolutely.

**Conor Bronsdon** (1:35)
So you may have heard Ben on previous episodes, including our recent Labs episode. He is LinearB's Director of Developer Relations.
And together, we're talking with Nik LeBlanc, VP of Engineering at DevCycle. Nik, welcome to the show.

**Nik LeBlanc** (1:47)
Thank you very much.

**Conor Bronsdon** (1:49)
And I heard a rumor this might be your first podcast, Nik, is that correct?

**Nik LeBlanc** (1:52)
Yeah, I'm terrified.

**Conor Bronsdon** (1:54)
No, you're gonna be great. I hope everyone here is listening. We'll kind of root Nik on a bit, cyclically positive probably for him. Because today's episode is gonna be another great Labs episode. And in Labs, as you know, we explore the data, research and insights that are most impactful to engineering organizations.
We won't be doing a data deep dive this week. If you want one of those, check out our recent episode on engineering benchmarks. But we will be exploring engineering team composition and knowledge distribution. Specifically, how they relate to Dora Metrics and a concept that LinearB is calling Continuous Merge and the tool that we built to help push this forward called GitStream.
Ben is our resident expert on continuous merge best practices and GitStream and Nik has adopted some of that tooling with his team at DevCycle. So we're going to ask him about his experience and how he thinks about some of those concepts as a VP of engineering.
But first, we are going to start off by talking about team composition and that knowledge distribution piece we mentioned. So, Nik, let's start with you. You implemented a practice which you admit is a bit controversial on your team and I think maybe speaks to your approach. As I understand it, you are breaking up engineering teams and recombining them to help distribute knowledge and rebalance teams. Can you elaborate on that?

**Nik LeBlanc** (3:07)
The history of DevCycle, we're also a company called TapLinux that focuses on A-B testing. And before DevCycle came around a couple of years ago, we ran into issues with how do we maintain our SDKs? How do we make sure that if there's bugs coming in with our SDKs, and we had many, how do we stay on top of those? And the problem that we had is we had basically one Android developer who was now a product person. He no longer did Android. We had one iOS developer and then we had our CTO. And our CTO happened to cut his teeth on Objective-C. So that was our team for dealing with bugs on our mobile SDKs. So there's a big bus problem there because basically if we were to lose our iOS developer or Android developer, we'd be screwed. We wanted to get away from that problem with DevCycle. So we wanted everyone to be contributing to the SDKs.
So that speaks to the cross-functional composition of the teams and how we wanted to make sure that any team could take on any type of work at any time. The idea of cutting them in half, traditionally teams have been led by what's known as a team lead. And that's my background. So I started as a team lead at another company and then came here as a senior and then was a team lead, then director, then VP. Team leads are hard to find. And there's not a lot of people, in my experience, that want that responsibility because it's ultimately it's like you're responsible for the code, you're responsible for the happiness of your team, you're responsible for everything. But you need some kind of presence that's pushing the team forward and making sure that everything's on track. So instead of trying to find new team leads, what we did is we just kind of invested in developers that we already had, gave them an opportunity to try the position, and then split the responsibilities of team lead into two positions.