How do I configure Swarmia if I use the Gitflow branching strategy?

Gitflow is a branching model often used with scheduled release cycles to define a set of features as a release. Work is done in feature branches that are reviewed and merged to the develop branch when they are ready for production. To release a collection of features, the develop branch is merged to the main branch.

Because each change is merged twice (first from the feature to develop, and then to main), we need to account for that to avoid double-counting and get accurate pull request cycle times and change lead times.

Excluding pull requests from develop to main

Since the pull requests from develop to main represent releases instead of feature work and often tend to be open for extended periods, we recommend excluding them from your metrics. You can simply set up an exclusion rule based on the develop branch name. (The branch name condition considers the head branch, i.e., the branch you're merging into the base branch.)

Now, your pull request metrics represent the work in feature branches, considering the pull request cycle time until changes are merged into the develop branch, i.e., reviewed and ready for production.

Deployment metrics

In addition to knowing how long it took for you to get the feature branch merged, it's also important to know the change lead time, i.e., the time it took from starting to work on the feature branch all the way until it was deployed to production.

Whenever there's a new deployment, Swarmia automatically finds the pull requests that were merged since the previous deployment, considering the pull request exclusions you configured in the previous step. That means you can see all the feature branch PRs included in each deployment.

The release PR (deploy → main) is excluded from the metrics, but you can see it under "Show excluded pull requests" in the deployment popup.