The software development team is an asset to any business in tech. The team members take on a project and breathe life into it to create a fantastic product. Therefore, your development team is responsible for the success or failure of your project. At Reintech, we have also witnessed the same- a good team can do wonders to your success rate.
As a result, every tech firm should track the performance of its development team. The task is necessary, as around 66% of software projects end in failure.
However, businesses must be careful while choosing software development performance metrics. The process is a bit nuanced, and you have to consider many factors.
Else, you can come up with inaccurate estimation of your goals. So, let’s find out how you can select the right KPIs to measure the efficiency of your software development team.
The Guide to Choosing Accurate Software Development KPIs
Entrepreneurs need to first establish their business goals to come up with the right metrics. As a result, measuring how many lines of code your team wrote may not paint a clear picture.
Instead, you can measure the number of successful deployments to develop a better understanding.
Therefore, select KPIs that help you measure your goals. Additionally, every KPI you select should answer a business question.
An example could be, “how many production issues did we have to fix?”
Next, think of a metric that will help you answer the above question. You can use several KPIs for the process like defect rate of defects fixed per day.
In addition, the metrics you select should:
- Help you take informed decisions to create business value
- Be easy to measure and quantify
- Correlate with various workflows and experiments
- Help you track a factor over time
- Have established use in the industry
- Be implementable without changing your existing processes too much
Next, we will go over some useful KPIs you can try for your project.
Meaningful KPIs for Assessing Software Development Team Performance
The software development industry uses a wide range of metrics to evaluate team performance. We have summed up the top ones you can use for your purposes.
1. Cycle Time
Cycle time is an excellent option to find out how much time your team needs to finish a workflow. Scrum masters often rely on this KPI to manage the productivity of SDLCs.
However, the goal of cycle time is not always to push the team to work fast. Instead, it can give you an idea of how much time your team takes to work on a specific task.
You can track your cycle time by counting the days or weeks you need to complete a workflow. Then it is possible to use your finding to predict future deadlines.
Uses:
- Measures overall performance of the team
- Helps identify disruptions or bottlenecks in development process
- Allows accurate forecast of completion times
2. Team Velocity
Agile teams can use team velocity to track the volume of tasks achieved during a sprint. You can use hours or story points to measure your team’s performance.
This KPI enables entrepreneurs to assess how fast a team can clear backlog. It is also presents a good estimation of how much work your team completes in a sprint.
You should track your team’s velocity across 3 – 7 sprints to establish an average. Many project management tools also come with velocity charts to manage the process.
However, keep in mind that each team in unique and has varying velocity.
Uses:
- Allows product managers to forecast accurately
- Helps in strategic planning
- Great to track changes in your development process
3. Mean Time to Repair
All systems need repairs from time to time. However, your aim should be finish the repair as soon as possible to avoid any unpleasant experience for your client.
Mean time to repair is the perfect metric to measure the efficiency of your repairing process. It includes several workflows, from the actual repairing to testing your fixes.
You can easily determine your mean time to repair by tracking how many hours you spend on repairs in a week, month, or sprints. Then, divide the total time taken with the total number of repairs.
In addition, businesses can use mean time between failures to determine how frequently their systems need repairing. It helps you measure the reliability of your code and take steps to increase the time between failures.
Uses:
- Helps to complete repairs faster
- Allows you to cut down the need for repairs
- Measure downtime
4. Code Coverage
Product managers need KPIs to evaluate the code quality of their development teams. A proven metric you can use to measure code quality is code coverage. It tests the number of lines of code executed while you run your automated tests.
The more code you execute, the better is the quality of your code. Therefore, you can hire a JavaScript developer and measure code quality using code coverage.
This KPI is suitable for teams that rely on test-drive approaches.
Uses:
- Improve covered code
- Facilitates code testing
- Generate clues and insights on uncovered lines
5. Release Burndown
All development teams need to complete tasks within deadlines. As a result, it is important to measure the performance of your releases.
Entrepreneurs can rely on release burndown KPI to stay on top of release progress. It can help them manage the release of software and apps.
Additionally, the metric provides solid data to prove your ROI to clients. You can prove yourself to be a leading dev shop and attract more clients.
Uses:
- Find out if your team is on schedule
- Determine how fast your team clears backlog
- Generate insight about team process when work changes
Final Thoughts
Using accurate KPIs is necessary to track the performance of your software development team. The metrics you choose should be legit, actionable, and easy to implement. Additionally, they should help you answer vital questions and build business value. You can start with the KPIs we reviewed and add more to the list based on your needs.