Measuring the effectiveness of a development team is one of the most difficult tasks that software managers face today. As a result, we’ve compiled a list of five developer metrics that are critical for determining your team’s productivity.
Sprint Burn-down reports
A sprint is a pre-determined period of time during which developers must complete tasks on time. The duration of a sprint is normally between one and four weeks. Developers also summarise the tasks they expect to complete during each Sprint at the start of the cycle.
They report whether tasks are to be begun, incomplete, or completed at the end of the Sprint. You’ll be able to see if your team has met their success targets by following these end burndown reports. If you aren’t careful, this metric can be misleading. If the team has set low targets for themselves and reports activities completed when they aren’t, then this metric’s accuracy for productivity purposes is suspect.
Velocity
A development team’s individual assessment of the complexity of completing a specific user tale is called storey points. Developers will gather software specifications and estimate the task’s complexity from this task.
However, each person’s velocity metric is distinct and should not be compared to that of another. The number of hours spent depends on a variety of factors, including experience, skill, and enthusiasm. It may, however, be contingent on adherence to best practises, code consistency, and testing.
This is why we can never tell which developer is more productive based on a storey time-tracking metric alone.
Cycle times
How long does it take to fix a problem?
The cycle time metric, in particular, looks at this. You can watch how quickly each problem is resolved as it arises, as well as see when many problems occur at once, whether teams are skilled at managing them quickly or whether they become frightened. How long does it take to fix a problem?
The cycle time metric, in particular, looks at this. You can watch how quickly each problem is resolved as it arises, as well as see when many problems occur at once, whether teams are skilled at managing them quickly or whether they become frightened.
Teams that consistently resolve problems in a logical timeframe and don’t panic when many issues occur at once can be relied upon to perform consistently well. Another way to keep track of problems is to visualise all of them over time: pending, in progress, and completed.
If you have an uneven number of pending or ongoing issues, they can easily pile up and outnumber the issues that have been resolved. To fix this, new work will need to be revived at times to clear out the backlog of pending issues. This isn’t an irritation or a setback; it’s a requirement for keeping a project on track.
Throughput
Your team’s throughput is approximately equivalent to its velocity. Throughput counts tasks and errors in addition to functions, while velocity tests the end result.
So, while velocity tells you what your team accomplished that can be marketed, throughput gives you a clearer picture of their total workload over time.
Open pull requests
When your developers finish a change request, they’ll save it to the code repository and then send a pull request to the rest of the team, asking them to review it. Each pull request will remain open until it has received input from colleagues and has been closed by a manager.
Having a lot of open pull requests indicates that a lot of work is being done, but it may also indicate that the reviewers aren’t doing their job. That’s what there is to it! Let’s see how you can increase the development team’s efficiency and effectiveness to produce better results now that you know what metrics to monitor to assess their productivity.