23 software development metrics to track today

Many top tech companies, such as Google, LinkedIn, and Peloton, take multi-dimensional approaches to tracking developer productivity. Google’s Developer Intelligence team, for instance, measures productivity across speed, ease, and quality, recognizing that these aspects interact and reveal trade-offs. Tracking how often your software engineering team does deployments can be extremely useful for understanding and improving on the speed with which you can deliver value to customers. Lead time is one of the key metrics that DORA (DevOps Research and Assessment group) espouses for optimizing the speed of value delivery to customers. Most often it is measured as the time between first commit and deployment, but that definition may be increasing in scope with newly available technologies and methods of measuring.

Sprint Burndown

It’s essential to understand the limitations of these metrics and consider more insightful alternatives. Understanding how work moves through your development process is vital for identifying bottlenecks and optimizing your workflow. Cumulative flow diagrams provide a visual representation of the flow of work items through different stages of your process over time. This metric helps you understand the stability and efficiency of your development pipeline. ‍To calculate the velocity of the software development team, it’s essential to determine the average speed of the team.

Quality and accuracy of data

By tracking code coverage, you can ensure that critical parts of your application are adequately tested and that changes to the codebase don’t introduce unexpected problems. Burndown is another one of those common agile methodologies that can be extremely useful to track from a leadership position. Burndown measures the trend of work that has been completed vs. what remains to be done over a certain period of time.

Benefits of tracking Software Development Metrics and KPIs

Sprint burndown is one of the prominent measurement metrics used by scrum teams to manage their development process. It offers a graphical representation that dictates the project progress within the prescribed time and the amount of work completed during each iteration. Metrics that focus only on internal processes overlook the customer experience. Therefore, you must consider incorporating customer satisfaction or feedback KPIs alongside them so your team can see the impact of their work from the user’s perspective. This helps align development efforts with customer needs and achieve long-term business success. Axify effectively tracks time investment by issue type, which helps you understand where your team’s efforts are concentrated.

KPI #1. Cycle Time

Falling out of the limits indicates there was some problem that should be revealed and discussed. But you can minimize the damage caused by those failures by proactively measuring the number of occurring failures and optimizing the time it takes to repair those faults. If the bug rate is more than the acceptable benchmark or the severity of the bugs is higher than the medium level, it’s time to make adjustments to your code. Simply put, it is the process of logging and monitoring the bugs or errors encountered during software testing. It’s used during DevOps to measure the number of times a code is being rewritten or iterated due to introducing a new feature or upgraded software version. PR size is the number of pull requests reviewed and merged with the ongoing project trajectory over a period.

• Reliability is crucial for tracking the stability and dependability of the software to minimize failure rates and ensure consistent functionality.
• It characterizes the period when software engineers explore various potential solutions to a problem.
• Calculating both metrics contributes to evaluating the overall productivity and performance of the software development team.
• A shorter lead time for changes shows streamlined workflows and prompt issue resolution.
• In this blog, we dive deep into KPIs in software development, their business benefits, and the top 10 KPIs you must establish for your development team.
• The hiring time defines the period from when the candidate applies for a job until they accept it.

KPI #3. Change Failure Rate

Quick, thorough code reviews are essential for identifying issues early and maintaining the quality of the codebase. This metric captures how fulfilled, happy, and healthy team members feel within their roles. Axify’s Team Morale tracker provides different metrics that follow developers’ well-being.

• It monitors the percentage of code that passes review without requiring significant revisions.
• Also, you can build a structured reporting system that tracks progress across development phases.
• If you emphasize the performance metrics of individual members, it can create competition rather than collaboration within your development team.
• Since effective software development requires team alignment and optimized systems, this step is a big no.
• Examples include Velocity (sprint work completion), Sprint Commitment vs. Completion (goal adherence), and Accuracy of Estimates (forecasting precision).
• There’s no denying that quality performance in software development is imperative for project success.

Work in Progress

The Code Churn metric reflects how many code lines were added, edited, or deleted within a certain period. It allows software managers to monitor the development process and the quality of developers’ work. If the churn begins to rise, it can be a sign of a problem that needs attention. Developers prefer not to interrupt their work often to see if they have succeeded or failed. However, breaking the measurement periods into smaller time frames helps determine the progress more accurately.

This metric is a key indicator of your testing effectiveness and helps you identify areas of your code that may be vulnerable to bugs. MTTR is the average time consumed in repairing the software after failure and can be calculated by total uptime divided by the total number of failures. Calculating both metrics contributes to evaluating the overall productivity and performance of the software development team. Using sprint burndown as a KPI can help your team adjust their performance accordingly when the measurement doesn’t align with predictions. Companies often use sprint burndown charts for their development teams to represent data, gauging time against story points. Here, a story point means assessing a software project’s size and the time needed to build it.

Sprint burning defines the process of measuring the number of tasks executed when executing a sprint (an established time period for certain tasks to be completed). Among software engineering KPIs, this is one of the key indicators as it measures the work done during sprints. It determines the speed at which the deployment team deploys code into different departments, such as staging, testing, and production. This KPI is among the four DORA metrics and is interlinked with others, such as change failure rate, lead time for changes, and mean time to recovery. Implementing agile methodologies can make measuring the company’s performance harder as the entire team must track agile metrics throughout the development cycle.

There are many types of software development metrics that are widely used to track and measure various aspects of the development process. Being able to provide an estimate as to when a given release, project, feature, or product will ship to end users has its obvious benefits. It helps all interested parties in the company (that means pretty much everyone) plan around the work that they need to do to either support your team or bring new functionality to market. In many companies, these predictions can be handwavy, especially when they are done by intuition and experience alone. But it’s better to provide an estimate and need to change it than to provide nothing at all.

Re-adjust the team’s performance if the results do not match the expectations. Correctly set KPIs also help ensure the end product quality and customer satisfaction, strengthening our clients’ reputation in the software market. If you’d like to get a top-grade software product with software development kpi metrics all potential risks controlled, KeyUA will be an excellent outsourcing partner to fulfill your development needs.

Instead, allocate some time to process optimization as well so you can increase customer satisfaction and, therefore, your ROI. To effectively track software development metrics and gain actionable insights, organizations often utilize a project management KPI dashboard. This dashboard serves as a centralized tool for monitoring and visualizing key performance indicators across projects and teams. More often than not, businesses end up selecting the wrong KPIs to measure their development team’s performance and success.

This software development KPI is used to measure the quality of the delivered code. You can capture it per release, sprint, month, week, or another time frame, depending on the project needs. The mean time between failures (MTBF) and mean time to recover/repair (MTTR) measure the production environment’s software performance. Software failures are almost inevitable, and these metrics help control how well the software recovers from them.