4 software development KPIs that matter today Posted on : Aug 27 - 2020

In today’s Agile-driven world, traditional KPIs are not the best measures of software development productivity. Here are redefined metrics for assessing team performance, output, and morale.

If only measuring software development productivity and tracking team performance were as simple as counting lines of code or hours worked. But the efficiency of software engineering teams, as with any technical or creative work, cannot be measured in quantity alone. The quality of the work and the collaboration of the team impact productivity in immediate and lasting ways. Add to that the iterative, evolving nature of Agile, and software development productivity becomes too fluid and interconnected to measure with traditional key performance indicators (KPIs).

The solution is to rethink KPIs to fit the forward momentum, broadened teams and required agility that define most software development today. If counting lines of code doesn’t give us a true measure of productivity, what can we count in software development? If hours clocked provides little insight into how far a scrum has advanced, what is the right measure of progress?

Consider these KPI alternatives as ways to better understand and measure the progress and efficacy of software teams, as well as the achieve the ultimate KPI goal of constant improvement at an acceptable and predictable pace throughout the product lifespan.

Problem solving

Software development today is a both a highly strategic and highly creative process. Each iteration brings new insights, considerations, and requests from customers. How resourcefully are software teams solving these problems?

This is a KPI that can be assessed through open/close rates: how often are issues opened and how effectively are software development teams managing them? This is not a quantity measure to gauge how many or how few production issues the team opens. The metric should be about the greater quality trend: how efficiently is the team addressing issues? If issues stay open for long durations, the team is struggling to problem solve. If issues (many or few) are efficiently dealt with as they arise, the team is scoring high on creative problem solving, which means they are succeeding in their collaboration. View More