Looking at the speed at which technology is updating, you could easily imagine of a product that is popular becoming almost old and outdated within a short span of time. Many professional software developers are considering efficiency and productivity more to cut down on extended production cycles.
A software engineer making simple little changes to the code with reduced churn rate will certainly meet a higher rate of efficiency.” to “A software engineer making simple little changes to the code with reduced churn rate will certainly meet a higher rate of efficiency. Check does your blockchain, wordpress, or java developer salary matches the market
The higher the proficiency, the greater the productivity, lightening speed product cycles, less time to promote etc. The software engineering team can make use of any standards to measure the efficiency as well as productivity throughout the process. Apart from the speed and other factors the most important things that matters at the end of the day is whether the software application built is capable enough to meet the needs of end users and improves the business of a particular company.
Keeping a check on the standards
Keeping a check on some standards is certainly important part to ensure that the engineering team of a firm is working efficiently as well as productively or not. Listed below are some standards that can help the developers to monitor
Lead time
It means measuring the time between the start stages of product development to its final completion. Of course the time taken to deliver a product successfully is entirely based on the complexity of the project and the number of software engineers involved in the project. Both these factors will decide the cost towards the project and variations in cost. When the developers track the lead time of a project it can help them get a fair idea about the time required to promote the current product and more similar projects to come.
Influence
Influence helps gauge the how the modifications done in code is going to influence the entire project. It also helps identify how the modifications can affect the software engineers who are involved in the development. This is certainly one of the vital steps to know about how much the alteration in code can extend the product promotion time in the market, adding more to the cost. Also, the developers can be assessed if they are devoting a lot of time to make some modifications which can have negative effect on individual productivity due to delays. Thus large modifications that are related to files or code are the modifications that are quite complicated and influence overall project creation.
Churn
Churn can be calculated in percentage where the time developers devote to edit, adding or deleting their code. A high percentage of churn implies rework and can point out that there is something wrong that needs to be addressed in the entire development process.
Efficiency
One of the important steps for software engineering consulting to measure the amount of productive code/code of each engineer adds to the business value. If a particular engineer starts building new solution and executing extensive code modifications then there are possibilities that he/she is going through trial and error process that would directly bring down the efficiency rate.
A software engineer making simple little changes to the code with reduced churn rate will certainly meet a higher rate of efficiency.
Cycle span
Cycle span is another section of lead time wherein you can analyze how much time would be taken to make the necessary modifications to the software and when it will be ready to use. Cycle time can be easily measured by a team using DevOps, CD/CI practices within less time as compared to other methods that can take months to measure the cycle time.
Open/close rates
The open& close rates are basically assessing the count of problems that are reported by the developers and resolve them/close them within a specified time span.
Production
Downtime analysis is what is important while you are following the production standards. It means the time expected between failures and time expected to repair them. This will give you a brief idea on the performance of the software at a production stage.
Which metrics can help you meet the objectives?
Well, the developers shouldn’t fall in prey of a lot of metrics. They should stick to the metrics that are important from their business perspective and help them meet business goals. You may get tempted to make use of metrics to measure the general trends to find out the existing problems. In that case you can do an extensive research to get to the root cause of the low productivity and low efficiency. For instance, even higher churn rate can be a reason as they may be issues with the overall development process wherein there is lack of transparency and needs things to be clarified.
Another possible reason could be issues with a particular engineer who may not be having the right skills and expertise for working on a particular code. On the other hand even a software engineer having low churn rate may end up development perfect code and it can be other way round wherein low churn rate implies that he/she has already fixed the issues.
Metrics are certainly helpful to help the management team gauge the entire project development process, but if they do not have the idea of how to use it to bring in improvement they might not even monitor things completely. In case you find drop in efficiency or productivity then it is the right time tracking software the above mentioned 7 metrics to find out the issues and take necessary steps to resolve them.
Conclusion
The above 7 metrics can help team management to figure out the strengths and weakness and they can explain it to the software developers so that they understand the areas they need to improve on. This will bring in positive changes to the entire project development and you will get high returns on investment, reduce costs and manage workload etc in a better way. You will be able to work in a systematic environment where there is less number of errors and the errors are rectified without affecting the productivity and efficiency. As a team manager you can make it happen.
