What software development metrics measure performances of the dedicated development team

Measuring developer performance without software development metrics tends to be a redundant effort that it needs to clarify performance KPIs to keep track of progress.

Proficiency and productivity refer to the core value that every dedicated development team tries to follow. Accordingly, it represents the power and expertise of the developer team, which directly influences the health of the whole development process.

However, defining clearly the terms of proficiency and productivity tends to be complicated tasks that trouble many leaders. To solving those complexities, many developers lean on software developer performance metrics to examine their work. In practice, most software development companies got struggling with fail projects related to over budget, slow progress, and less functioned delivery. Indeed, roundly 90% of those troubles could be suitably deterred when implementing an appropriate setting and tracking some KPIs for software developers.

In this article, we will introduce you to hand-selected software development metrics, which help you escape from the ocean of available software development KPIs.

Software development metrics: the fundamental of productivity

In general, software productivity indicates the relation between functional proficiency of the software and the required cost of development. To comprehensively understand software productivity, developers regularly depend on size-related metric and function-related metrics. Whereby, software development company could identify what factors impacting the project performance as a whole.

In fact, one software solution claimed to be productive when the useful functionalities reflect the extreme effort of a dedicated team corresponding with the outcome size and project duration. Accordingly, the most common software quality metrics measuring the productivity have to follow the four criteria, including consistent, measure viability, available for benchmarking, repeatable in different software development projects.

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How to select the essential developer performance metrics

Undoubtedly, it is seemingly impossible to follow all available developer performance metrics since this effort consumes an extremely high amount of resources and costs. In most cases, businesses owned and dedicated development team have to take the discussion to clarify what factor needs to be tracked simultaneously. Based on this result, quality assurance engineers and business analysis would decide required actual data to be measured.

In practice, the process of selecting metrics have influenced by several factors, suggesting that a particular set of software development metrics have to serve the unique needs and requirement. Expressly, each development stages need to track the bizarre metrics related to unique goals and purposes. In which it could be broken into eight groups:

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Highlight the list of software development metrics in common

Each software development metrics illustrates the quantification aspect of proficiency and productivity coming from every stage of the software development life cycle. Those metrics can be calculated via dynamic sources, which prevent the risk of bias. Therefore, you could get stuck in overwhelming of metrics to track.

In fact, it is impossible to control or optimize the entire available KPIs that some software metric has to sacrifice to protect others. When applying any software metrics, developers have to make sure to select a set of valuable ones to reduce rambling and unfocussed.

Related article: Tips for enhancing the productivity of dedicated development teams

1.  Software metrics in measuring delivery productivity  

Sprint burndown: claimed to be a centered metrics broadly using in Agile software development to present the left tasks over time in relation to estimated effort. In other words, If the burndown story point over the effort line, the project has a high possibility of not strictly following deadlines. Thus, a dedicated team needs to focus on the actual tasks left in progress. The core output getting from tracking burndown metrics is the gap between the planned and genuine progress.

• User satisfaction: to measure user satisfaction, many developers believed in customer satisfaction scores. In most cases, it bases on users’ feedbacks, frequently rely on the feeling when experiencing user interface (UI), software interactions, function understandability, unexpected errors, and more. Commonly, each section would be marked by users. Then final score reflecting the user satisfaction would be calculated by the average point users marked in each section.
• Dedicated development team velocity: represent the number of works that would be completed during an Agile sprint or iteration, which can be visualized by a sprint burndown chart. The velocity metrics will help you to set the delivery time more accurately based on realistic sprint forecasts. Additionally, it also shows the hidden challenges involving in sprint planning that you should pay attention.
• Throughput: this metric measures the work units that the dedicated development team completes in a given period of time. Whereby, leaders and project managers have evidence to detect whether the team is overload or be able to add tasks.
• Cycle time: is defined as the duration of completing a particular work, which provides accurate estimated delivery time based on dividing the whole project into small pieces of work. Alternatively, cycle time also tells the leader regarding the actual team speed, which reflects the software productivity.

2. Software metrics in measuring maintainability  

• Lead time: defined as the period from generating a new feature idea to time releasing this feature to users. In fact, the load time metric measures the speed performance of software development teams.
• Mean time to repair (MTRP): measure the time spent to fix bugs to ensure apps or websites perform smoothly. The shorter MTRP is, the better proficiency developers achieve.
• Bug rate: refers to the number of bugs detected when deploying new features, presenting the outcome quality, which is delivered to users. In the typical case, a low bug rate seemingly generates the better health of website or mobile applications, which commonly measure by error count, response time, disk space, threat counts, and more.
• Code coverage: measures the amount of code has comprehensively test and completes the quality assurance process. In other words, the code convergency metric indicates the level of possibility the software solutions encounter errors during launching.

3. Software metrics in measuring the effectiveness  

• Average estimated task volume: Indicate the amount for a workflow of the dedicated development team when any change occurred. In practice, average task volume metrics commonly put in comparison with the estimated task volume set in the planning process. Following the metrics, leaders could understand the level of consistency among the team in respecting the plan.
• Recidivism: commonly used to track the respecting of software requirements among development team members. When recidivism reported in high numbers, there was an existing expectation occurred that not all the team is on the same page. Accordingly, leaders need to investigate the error and fix it as soon as possible.

Final words: Above software development metrics examples are definitely not a full indication, involving in software quality assurance. However, we confident that it deserves to be the central software metric your team should focus on promoting your efficiency and productivity. Obviously, each Software development company needs to build its own set of metrics that highly fit with the business nature and resources. We hope this article will provide you with the starting point in executing your own works.