According to research by the Society for Human Resource Management and Gallup, less than 20% of employees feel their company's reviews of their performance inspire them to improve their work. Likewise, 95 % of managers aren't content with their companies' systems for reviews. As such, it would seem that employees have a negative, or at the very least complicated, relationship with monitoring and reviewing performance. Software developers encounter more challenges than other employees in this regard since there is commonly a knowledge gap between those conducting reviews (the business side) and those "on the ground," the developers.

Despite the challenges of creating effective review systems, it is important to monitor workflows, infrastructure, and employee performance to ensure that customers receive the expected results. Given the many metrics involved in software development, a proper approach to measuring performance and productivity should support the professional development of engineers and the creation of high-quality products.

No data means no progress

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Mad Devs believes in tracking the metrics our engineers produce for two reasons:

  • Support: Developers require guidance and assistance with challenging tasks and when they want to develop their professional skills. Without objective data, it's hard to understand if there is a problem.
  • Quality control: Creating great products and delivering excellence to our clients means understanding how processes are working, what is happening in projects, and what, if any, issues have appeared.

However, before any team or business can track data, it has to be created. That is why Mad Devs requires team members to leave artifacts on their work with the following tools and practices:

  • Comments
  • Worklogs
  • Stand-ups
  • Task trackers

The rest of the article will provide more details and explain the importance of these artifacts and habits, such as tracking software development metrics beyond code-related activities.

Software development metrics

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Most software companies have one or more teams of developers, and each team includes several individuals. These obvious facts are important to remember when evaluating the performance of software development within a given business. Likewise, the metrics Mad Devs employs can be divided into hard and soft skills. Together, this information provides signals on how a team is performing and how the individuals within it are working on their tasks.

This data refers to the hard skills of software development.

Cycle time: Shows the time it takes developers to start a task and complete it. A shorter cycle time indicates faster delivery.

Lead time: Displays the total time from when a request is made to when it's delivered, including waiting, development, and testing.

Throughput: This refers to the number of tasks (features, bug fixes, etc.) a team completes in a specific time period. Higher throughput often reflects better team efficiency.

Velocity: Shows the amount of work (usually in story points) a team finishes in each sprint. This metric can be used to predict future work capacity.

Code churn: Used to understand how much code is rewritten once it's written. If this metric is high, that could mean planning or misaligned objectives.

Defect rate: A means of understanding the quality of code that displays the number of bugs or issues in relation to features.

Sprint burndown: Shows the amount of work remaining over the course of a sprint. A consistent downward trend reflects balanced task allocation and steady progress.

Deployment frequency: Tracks how regularly updates are pushed to production. Frequent, incremental updates suggest streamlined DevOps workflows.

Mean time to recovery (MTTR): Represents the average duration to resolve production issues. Quicker recovery signals robust incident response practices.

Code review time: Measures the duration needed to complete the code review process. Faster reviews balance speed and code quality.

Work-in-progress (WIP): Indicates the number of tasks being actively worked on. Limiting WIP helps prevent delays and maintain focus on priorities.

Soft skill metrics

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To consider a developer's overall performance, it is helpful to understand how they interact with their colleagues and the company. These metrics are difficult to measure with specific data; however, they add to the understanding of productivity and performance. 

  • Participation in discussions: How often engineers ask questions and make suggestions in daily syncs and other meetings with colleagues and business stakeholders. This demonstrates interest and investment in a project.
  • Recognizing the context: Approaches to development depend on the needs of the business and project. Engineers can achieve mutual understanding and agreement with the client on these details to solve problems without creating them.
  • Using ready-made solutions: Communicating with teammates can save time when someone has a solution for an issue or experience with a similar one.
  • Giving reports: Daily activities, such as stand-ups and comments in tasks, provide useful information to teammates and demonstrate an engineer's commitment to a project and their work.
  • Initiative: Such as objective arguments in favor of a particular solution or requesting assistance. Both of these actions demonstrate that an engineer cares about their work and wants to perform well.
  • Responding to criticism and feedback: It is important to understand, through stand-ups and comments, how engineers react to criticism of their work or feedback in general. Their responses can demonstrate a willingness to compromise and grow or a lack of appreciation for different opinions.
  • Punctuality: If an engineer completes tasks within the deadline, responds to messages in a timely manner, and arrives at meetings on time, including virtual ones, they are showing a commitment to high performance.

These areas can be measured either directly or indirectly through the activities mentioned earlier, such as stand-ups, worklogs, and comments. Software developers who perform these activities throughout the day create this data, which instruments collect and analyze. 

Skills Matrix: Definition, Benefits and Examples

Explore how to maximize success with skills matrices, the benefits of a skill matrix for employees, managers, and organizations, and the steps for creating and updating a skill matrix.

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Collecting metrics

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Information radiators

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This is a generic term for a display or chart that visualizes key project or team data, designed to communicate important information quickly and effectively to everyone involved. Typically placed in a common area or accessible digitally, information radiators provide real-time updates on metrics, progress, and issues.

Radiators help teams and businesses keep a project moving and improving and also make it easier to identify bottlenecks or obstacles and maintain a record of what team members are doing.

Examples of information radiators

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Radiators can be physical illustrations or digital within project management platforms. Common examples in software development include:

  • Kanban boards
Example of Kanban board.
  • Sprint burndown charts
Example of sprint burndown chart.
  • CI/CD pipeline dashboards
CI/CD pipeline dashboard.

An advantage of these and other radiators is that teams can adapt them to define the metrics they need that match their workflow.

At Mad Devs, we use radiators to track business metrics and design them as tools that fit our workflows and the specifics of a given project and the business as a whole.

Marketing radiator

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The marketing team uses its radiator to display data on the effectiveness of current marketing strategies. The marketing radiator monitors website traffic and its fluctuations to help the team detect and analyze the factors that influence traffic. For example, the team can observe how a single blog post or publication affects the number of website visitors.

Mad Devs' marketing radiator.

Website traffic is one metric displayed on the radiator. Others include:

  • Number of visitors to the website
  • Traffic value fluctuations within a specific period
  • Top countries of visitors
  • Devices used to visit the website
  • Best performing pages
  • Best performing posts

The marketing radiator provides the team with all the data it needs to keep the website at the top of searches, attract leads, and inform the world about Mad Devs.

Project-specific radiators

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Teams working on specific projects apply radiators attuned to the product or service they are creating. For example, if a team is working on a payment solution, their radiator will display data such as this:

  • Number of people using a specific payment method
  • Turnaround for a specific period
  • Names of buyers and sellers if any goods and services have been sold
Example of Slack radiators.

Here is an example of a radiator connected to a solution for the transportation industry:

  • Number of drivers using the app
  • Number of passengers using the app
  • Route metrics

The idea behind using a radiator is to get information that shows us whether our efforts are correct and whether we are moving in the right direction. 

Has the team implemented a new feature, and it caused a sudden drop in the number of users? It might mean that the feature doesn't work as it is supposed to or something important was missed. It helps us to react on time and make the needed changes to improve the situation. 

Technical metrics

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Together with business metrics, it is critical for engineering teams to see the technical and coding metrics mentioned earlier. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, it allows this to react to poor performance quickly. Secondly, it is helpful for developers to see real users engaging with their product.

Metrics for testing

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One such radiator concerns test metrics to assess product quality. The specific metrics differ depending on the project; however, the Mad Devs team applies standard approaches and tools to ensure we deliver the expected solution. All Mad Devs' code is covered with tests, meaning we constantly monitor code coverage metrics through our code coverage report: 

Software development testing metrics.

Our teams use this information to check:

  • If all tests have passed or not
  • The percentage of test coverage
  • The number of statements in the program that have been executed
  • The number of branches of the control structures that have been executed
  • The number of branches in the control structure that have been executed
  • The number of lines of source code that have been tested
  • The number of defined functions that have been called

This data provides enough context to understand whether testing was successful and where improvements to the code are needed.

Lighthouse radiator

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Our project teams that work on webpages use Google Lighthouse to track the quality of the pages. They audit them for performance, accessibility, SEO, and more. To provide constant updates on these aspects, the teams use a script that runs the page through Lighthouse and delivers a score to a group channel in Slack:

PageSpeed Insights Report.

Teams keep track of progress and can react to any significant, negative changes in a short amount of time.

Logging tools: understand the results

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Metrics provide essential details to how workflows support or hamper the creation of value, and businesses that use them can reap many benefits. Another aspect of productivity involves looking beyond the raw data on user behavior, resource usage, or any other aspect of a project to find the specific reasons for a low cycle time or higher bug frequency. To do this, Mad Devs uses logging tools.

They show the sequence of events that led to the results shown in metrics. There are many logging tools available. This section will explore our team's favorites: ELK stack and DataDog.

ELK

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This is an acronym that refers to three projects: Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana:

  • Elasticsearch is a full-text search and analytics engine.
  • Logstash is a log aggregator that collects data from multiple sources, converts it, and sends it to different destinations, e.g. Elasticsearch.
  • Kibana provides an interface that enables users to visualize and analyze data via graphs and charts. 

ELK is a log management platform that enables users to collect massive volumes of data from anywhere across infrastructure and then search, analyze, and visualize this data in real time.  

DataDog

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DataDog is a monitoring, security, and analytics platform. At times, our team decides that ELK is not necessary for a particular project, so they only use DataDog.

Automated alerts to maintain focus

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While metrics and logs are important, it is difficult to check them constantly. In the end, we want to concentrate on our work. On the other hand, it's important to learn immediately when something has gone wrong, which is why Mad Devs use alerting tools to quickly react to issues and prevent the accumulation of errors and bugs. Here are the tools our team recommends. 

Sentry

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Sentry detects various and unique errors in user behavior and provides sufficient information about the bug to fix it, even within a couple of minutes in most cases. More complex issues may require several hours or more.

Sentry.

Uptimerbot

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Uptimerbot is a free tool used to monitor the production/staging environment. It sends real-time alerts when production/staging is down and allows our team to fix it as soon as possible. Uptimerbot sends alerts via email, SMS, and Slack. 

GitLab Events Integration 

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Gitlab Events Integration monitors for CI/CD job failures, performance issues, and deployment status. Our team receives alerts in a Slack channel, which allows them to take action immediately. 

Prometheus

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Prometheus is not just a tool. It is a monitoring system that records real-time metrics in a time series database. It can be set up to send alerts when a specific condition is maintained during a preset period. The alerts are sent to Alertmanager. 

Grafana

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We use Grafana to visualize the metrics provided by Prometheus. While the latter sends metrics in the form of numbers, Grafana turns these metrics into graphs and models. These visuals allow our team to track the project's progress, regression, and to build hypotheses.  

Grafana

Alert Manager

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We use this tool to receive alerts sent by client applications. When Alertmanager receives an alert from Prometheus, it chooses whether to silence it or forward it to the right team. The Alertmanager debugs and groups alerts and sends them to the correct receiver integration:

  • Email
  • OpsGenie
  • PagerDuty

Considering the tool's convenience, it is not surprising that Mad Devs uses it in all of its projects.

The importance of metrics

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The amount of data that teams produce is growing, and while it can be a challenge to collect and analyze it, ignoring the benefits monitoring brings is a devastating choice. If a team doesn't use any metrics, monitoring, alerting, and logging, there will be no means of knowing when production and staging are down, and bugs will accumulate to the degree that developers, managers, and customers will become frustrated and dissatisfied.

Mad Devs applies all the necessary tools to give clients a clear picture of a project team's productivity and create high-quality products and services.

Explore the chapters

Time Tracking in Software Development

Time Tracking in Software Development

Time management is essential to the productivity of a team as a whole and every individual team member. It is one of the main reasons why we track time.

Effective Remote Team Meetings

Effective Remote Team Meetings: Standups, Team Meeting, and 1-on-1

Managing a team of developers isn’t an easy task, even if developers work in an office. It becomes more complicated when the team is big and when you need to manage them remotely. At Mad Devs, we prefer to work remotely. We work on a good number of projects, from small startups to complex enterprise solutions. That’s why we need efficient ways to ensure every team member works properly.

Software Engineering Reports: How to Write a Project Status Report.

Software Engineering Reports: How to Write a Project Status Report

Project reporting is important in software development. Among all the reports that we write, a software engineering report takes a special place. Here, you can read about the importance of software reporting, what a software project status report is, the benefits of reporting and risks that arise if reports are not written, and how to write a report correctly.A software engineering report is a document that communicates the implementation of design ideas to stakeholders. It is made to communicate the results of work and to outline the plan for future tasks. At Mad Devs, we write a software engineering project report every month to:In this software project report sample, we can clearly see that our software engineering project reports include: If there are changes in the team, we mention them in the section "Team's updates & changes."

Retrospective Meeting in Software Development Team

Retrospective Meeting in Software Development Team

Scrum retrospective meetings are a practice widely adopted by Agile teams. While earlier, such a practice didn’t exist, it has already proven its efficiency. With the development of the Agile environment, teams started being focused on frequent product releases and customer updates. As soon as one release is performed, another one follows. With such a pace, it is difficult to stop and reflect on what was done, what was good, what was bad, and what can be improved.

Software Development Metrics

Software Development Metrics: How to Measure Productivity in Software Development?

According to research by the Society for Human Resource Management and Gallup, less than 20% of employees feel their company's reviews of their performance inspire them to improve their work. Likewise, 95 % of managers aren't content with their companies' systems for reviews. As such, it would seem that employees have a negative, or at the very least complicated, relationship with monitoring and reviewing performance. Software developers encounter more challenges than other employees in this regard since there is commonly a knowledge gap between those conducting reviews (the business side) and those "on the ground," the developers.Despite the challenges of creating effective review systems, it is important to monitor workflows, infrastructure, and employee performance to ensure that customers receive the expected results. Given the many metrics involved in software development, a proper approach to measuring performance and productivity should support the professional development of engineers and the creation of high-quality products.

Project Management Using Jira.

Project Management Using Jira: Workflow and Best Practices

Gone are the days when a lack of options forced us to use spreadsheets for project management and planning. Now, plenty of project management solutions are available to businesses and teams. At Mad Devs, we use Atlassian's Jira for efficient and transparent project management. However, not many project managers know that Jira is more than an efficient project management solution. It can be integrated with many other tools and services.One of the main reasons our team relies on Jira is its extensive functionality. Every project is unique and requires a special approach and a specific toolset for effective software project management with Jira. With this platform, Mad Devs can choose the necessary stack to plan, track, and release even the most complex projects. While there is no single correct way to organize a project in Jira (everything depends on its unique context), we have collected best practices based on our experience creating transparent and efficient project management practices and want to share them with you.

The Importance of Software Demo

Importance of Software Demo

Whatever we are building—be it an app, a website, an enterprise-level solution, demo sessions are important. They help us develop better solutions, build more trustful relationships with clients, boost the team's motivation, and collect feedback. That's why we organize demo sessions on a regular basis and prepare them in our own special way. But first, let us have a look at the ways they help us to work better and build better solutions.

The Importance of Documentation in Software Development.

Importance of Documentation in Software Development

The importance of documentation in software development is very easy to underestimate, but it can be a critical mistake for a project or even an entire company. However, the role of properly written and maintained documentation throughout the software development lifecycle is essential for all parties, from the company and its developers to customers and end users. It explains all the features of a project, informs us how we can work with them, helps to understand the project's functionality, and allows us to reduce onboarding time and costs.Today we cover what software documentation is, what types there are, and why documentation is important in software development. We'll share industry best practices, approaches, and tools for documentation. Also, we will talk about single source of truth (SSOT), which is impossible without quality software documentation, but highly important to carry comprehensive information about everything that happens in a company and its projects, making this information most accessible and usable for all participants.Let's start with the concept of why there is so much attention paid to properly compiling and maintaining documentation and why having it can create a system that helps the entire company work much better.

Optimization of Software Delivery Pipeline.

Optimization of Software Delivery Pipeline

The development process can be compared with a construction site. While a lot of work is needed to develop databases, applications, etc., a foundation shall be created to enable productive and reliable software development and delivery. Continuous integration, continuous delivery (CI/CD), and continuous deployment are the foundation practices that make the work on a software product easier.

Quality Assurance Software Testing Life Cycle.

Quality Assurance: Process of Software Testing Life Cycle

The quality of a software product impacts directly the brand reputation and influences client retention. Just a single faulty product can have disastrous consequences for both the business using the product and the company that has developed it. That’s why ensuring the top quality of every developed product is our main goal.That’s why we test our software. Software testing reduces the possibility of errors and bugs.

Technical Debt Management

Technical Debt Management

This artilcle was updated on 7 June, 2024Technical debt is a fact of life in software development. If you skipped our first article or glossary term on the topic, here's a quick review of what it is.When teams choose a faster and simpler solution over a more reliable oneIn these situations, a team collects debt in the form of poor code quality or lack of testing that will gather interest over time. This interest will need to be paid by means of refactoring code or updating libraries and services, which require extra time and other resources. The scope of the work involved in "repaying" tech debt depends on the sacrifices the team made as well as the type of debt. Very basically, there are 2 types:

Code Review. How to Do It Properly and Reap the Benefits

Code Review: How to Do It Properly and Reap the Benefits

Providing a customer with high-quality code is one of the primary goals of any software development team. But the truth is nobody’s perfect, and whatever a developer’s level of proficiency and experience is, people do make mistakes.Code review is a time-honored method that can help to detect errors and make your code nice and clean. What’s more, code review is not only about fixing bugs, it’s about building team cooperation. In this post, we’ll highlight the importance of code review and share our personal experience in practicing this. 

External Software Audits

Internal and External Software Audits: What Are They and Why Are They Important?

Close examinations are what we regularly experience in our life—be it a health check or vehicle inspection. Just like a car, any software product also needs to be thoroughly examined to make sure it is well-functioning and secure for its user. Such an inspection is called a software audit. In this post, we explain what it means, how it should be conducted, and why it matters. Keep on reading to find valuable insights from Mad Devs.   

SDLC Developers Onboarding & Offboarding Processes Checklist

SDLC: Developers Onboarding & Offboarding Processes

Onboarding and offboarding take an important part in the company's processes. While there are many standard practices and checklists on how to onboard a new specialist and offboard somebody who is leaving the company, we at Mad Devs have our own practices that have been proven the best for us. Earlier, onboarding was one of the most undervalued processes. Now, the approach to onboarding has changed completely. Even though in many companies, the onboarding procedures remain erratic, undocumented, casual, and limited in scope, the situation is changing for the better rapidly.

Customer Onboarding Process

Customer Onboarding Process

An onboarding process is a crucial step across the board. But in software development the onboarding process is, frankly, not limited to the IT team only.  Even though many in the industry see a customer as somebody “from outside”Onboarding of a customer is the most vital moment in any software development project, for a ground up startup projects all the way to corporate legacy systems. That’s why we at Mad Devs play this close to our chest. We have a positive and clear customer onboarding process to ensure that you know everything about your project progress and how we work. We are open to discussion, and we make sure all the processes are as transparent as possible. Depending on project-specific features, the customer onboarding process template might change. Here, we are going to talk about the “fixed” parts of the process and take you for a ride on our customer onboarding process.

Managing Developers Remote Team Communication

Managing Developers: Remote Team Communication

Remote work replaced the traditional 8-hour office routine. After the global pandemic, the business landscape underwent a profound transformation. Virtually overnight, many companies adapted to remote work and proved that the workforce could seamlessly operate from home offices and kitchen tables alike.While many tech companies have successfully navigated this transition, maintaining and fostering remote teams in the long run is the real challenge. As our world becomes more interconnected, managing teams scattered across different countries and time zones demands unique skills and strategies.Communication is a cornerstone of effective team management, and this is especially true for remote teams. Mad Devs has vast experience in managing remote developers, and we know how to do it successfully. In this article, we dive into managing remote teams in the tech industry and sustain collaboration.

Why do you need software prototyping and mockups

SDLC: Why Do You Need Software Prototyping and Mockups?

Before an idea turns into a fully functioning software product, it may come a long way from a black-and-white sketch written in a notepad to a usable app in the hands of an end-user. As a matter of fact, there are several stages in the SDLC (software development life cycle), and the two of them are a mockup and a prototype. In this post, we’ll figure out what they are, whether you need them and why, and how to build them properly.

Growth Ways for Developers in Mad Devs

Growth Ways for Developers in Mad Devs

There’s no newbie developer who doesn’t dream of becoming a high-level professional one day. It would be strange not to have such a dream. But what does it take and how long is the way? There’s no secret formula, and you can’t just turn into a godlike programmer overnight. It takes years. However, there are some actionable practices that can make your way to professional growth shorter. Mad Devs is the place to grow and develop both professionally and personally. In this post, we’ll share our first-hand experience in helping developers become better copies of themselves.