Hi there, in this article I want to talk about engineering team and how to measure the performance to help you now and future. Engineering team is such a heart for technology business/start-up. But sometimes, engineering leader flying blind about this the simplest question about are we improving? What we will improve? What parts is need to be improved?
You may know some of them answer by showing line of code produces and the number of bugs when developing an application or software. Heeyy… that’s the traditional way, you have to move to best practices use this metrics to get best outcomes of engineering team.
Why Important!
When you understand how your team is working, it helps you and company in present or in future to lead predication like:
- How long that project to be completed by your team?
- How much effort is needed by your team?
- What the budget of project?
- and Help to plan for future projects.
Beside that, you can identify where your team good at, in what area your team is over and under-staff to improve and allow your team see the progress they have made.
Metrics you need
Here what I found from Book Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps, Dr. Forsgren and her DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) team built four new key metrics compiled from six years of research and 23,000 datasets from companies all around the world. These metrics — designed to be more accurate and informative for measuring engineering productivity — are lead time, deploy frequency, time to restore, and the number of issues per change.
Lead Time
Lead time means how long it takes to go from backlog status to production. Lead time is a crucial factor in the software development lifecycle, but measuring lead time for any given aspect of development can be challenging. Adopting agile methodologies and continuous integration practices makes it possible to identify which areas are slowing down your release cycles.
Deploy Frequency
Deploy frequency give you an insight into how the team is doing and highlight areas that need improvement. It also can provide visibility into engineers’ productivity and help identify bottlenecks in their processes.
Time To Restore
Time to restore means how many hours it takes to solve a production issue. For example, how many hours pass between when engineers are assigned to the issue and when the issue is resolved? For example, some bugs found in production app and how long your team recover this issue.
QA Team as quick as possible perform root-cause, do analysis and then report to Product manager to assign that task to engineer. How fast your team to recover from that issue is measured for this metrics.
Number Issue per Change
This metrics give insight about record of how many of the problems raised by the QA team made into production per change for each team member. If your team is having issues making it into production every other deployment, there might be underlying issues you need to address, either with the team or with your expectations. When you see this comes from the same person, you come closer personally to check where they’re struggling.
The traditional way give you an output, but this new metrics give you outcomes that make engineering team performance be great. By having a great engineering team improve and improve, of course produced the high quality software.