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Merge requests in ~1 day, not ~87 weeks.
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Aviation

Merge requests in ~1 day, not ~87 weeks.

How a product team at a major U.S. airline cleared years of branch and merge-request backlog in a six-week Dojo and shipped its first cloud product in just over three weeks.

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THE CHALLENGE

A capable team, boxed in by the system.

The team was capable but boxed in. Ideas took 3-5 months to reach customers, work passed through about 88 handoffs (most outside the team), and stale branches and merge requests had piled up for months. Nearly everything still deployed to an on-prem data center.

THE APPROACH

Six weeks of pairing on real product work.

We ran an immersive six-week Dojo with the team on real product work, not exercises. We paired on trunk-based habits, CI/CD, test-driven development and infrastructure as code, so the team could deploy to the company’s cloud platform for the first time and keep going without us.

WHAT WE BUILT TOGETHER

A path from commit to cloud.

  1. Trunk-based flow: open branches 227 —> 3, open merge requests from 10 —> 2

  2. Repositories consolidated from 8 to 2

  3. Terraform and CI/CD path from commit to the company cloud platform

  4. Test-driven development and pairing on live product work

  5. AI applied throughout: tests, MR summaries, commit messages, Terraform, debugging

BUSINESS OUTCOME

The constraint was the system

The team took its first product to cloud production in just over three weeks. The pilot also showed leadership that the constraint was the system, not the talent: handoffs and project-based funding were what stood between other teams and the same results.

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ROI ACHIEVED

Built to repeat. A proven Dojo model, ready for the next teams.

  • Team cycle time: 15.2 days → 10.75 days

  • Open branches: 227 → 3, with merge requests landing in about a day.

  • A repeatable Dojo model for the next teams.