“Software Measurement” is the baseline element of Software engineering.  

But, writing the lines of code or the number of hours spent at the office is not how you evaluate the effectiveness of a software developer in doing their job. Because in today’s competitive industry, like Software Development, quality almost eclipses the quantity of the job done. 

I consider the straightforward approach to defining productivity or effectiveness to hire a software developer to get the desired outcomes in minimal time; the core focus should be on “desired results. ”

To be precise, the word “desired results” should be specified to know what to do, how to do it, and how much time they should invest in it. 

Here, I have pocketed some inescapable metrics to help you specify your software Development team’s goals and track how each team is performing towards accomplishing those goals. 

Indeed, this performance is what defines the productivity of your team. 

To put simply, you can easily understand when your development team does their work efficiently and what factors contribute to that. 

Usually, measurement helps you find scenarios when “things do not add up” because of unclear or conflicting project requirements. A study conducted in 2008, estimated that 68% of surveyed firms were statistically unlikely to have a successful project due to poor project requirements. 

More precisely, they were probable to face the below listed issues: 

• End up with 180% more of the expected time.
• The budget increased by 160% more than the original. 
• The final product is 70% lesser than the desired functionality. 

Here, in this blog, I’ll be shedding light on metrics in software engineering, how to access them to improve different aspects of your agile product lifestyle and finally, boost up your team’s performance and business outcomes.

What Actually Is Software Productivity? 

Software productivity is defined as the perfect ratio between the functional elements of the final software product to the efforts and expenses needed for development. 

And, to measure productivity, the software developers in Dubai uses two types of metrics:

• Function

The “Function” oriented metrics represent the amount of helpful functionality shipped during the timeline. Function points and app points are the most commonly used metrics for waterfall software development, while story points remain the usual metrics for agile projects.  

• size

The size-related metric indicates the size of outcomes from an activity. For example, the lines of written source code.

A Healthy Tip – The productivity metric you will choose to keep track, should be:

• Consistent: Use clean definitions so the number has meaning. 
• Available: This can be used to benchmark.
• Auditable: The outsider can witness the growth of the measures
• Repeatable: Different user groups will essentially get the number 

Considering that your potential development team will be responsible for keeping track of themselves, go for metrics that are easy to get hands-on and communicate. But, don’t try to track all software development metrics that are demanding to collect.  

Better, find a handful of areas for team improvement, think which KPIs can represent those areas and gather data to estimate those. Then step ahead to the next area for improvement. 

The Business Advantages Of Having Software Development Productivity Metrics In Place

The objective behind why software development companies in Dubai use precise metrics and measurement in software engineering is to find and manage what can affect software development and the project as a complete. 

All in all, using software development metrics contributes to the following:

1. Concise Project Planning

The project managers and development team leads often get more insights of the project and augur the possible outcomes with more accuracy and precision. For example, they can predict:

• What will be the cost of each process?
• Will the process be effective?
• How can improvisation be made?

What will be the cost of each process?

You can easily estimate the costs to clutch requirements, the cost for designing and specification of the system, accompanied with the cost to develop and test it. Opting this way you can understand the contribution of each aspect to the total project cost and establish better priorities. 

Will the process be effective?

To evaluate if the process will be effective, estimate how frequently and precisely you are delivering new units, assess the effects of new practices or changes, and outline targets for process and product improvements. 

How can improvisation be made? 

Improvisation can be done after measuring the time it takes to conduct each major development activity and also estimate its effect on quality and productivity. Next, you can compare the costs and advantages of certain practices to determine which is worth the investment. 

Else, you can benchmark two different practices to choose a better approach. For instance, ask two teams to test different DevOps practices and evaluate which maximizes code quality.

Better Software Developers Performance 

In the aisle of software development, the productivity metrics clarify performance expectations. Your team of software developers in Dubai remain engaged as they know exactly what is expected from them at work. Metrics communicate your expectations and present you with how to measure a developer’s productivity without any bias.

In a nutshell, productivity metrics for software development help you find what factors affect your team’s effectiveness and remove the ones that would ultimately lead to a contended, high-performing team. 

Good Product Result 

The right amalgam of the previous elements contributes to streamlined workflows and constant discovery of new insights that focus on improving existing product life cycles. 

Besides, you can spot the common bottlenecks, take immediate action and deploy better code quicker and in an affordable manner. 

The final question here is – “How to measure software productivity”?

Simple, quantify individuals’ input and pay attention to agile software metrics that make the difference. 

The Array Of Software Development Productivity Metrics Worth Keeping A Track Of

You can easily prepare your software development team to give their best work quickly and efficiently. Still, if your end product is software that works but is not providing any business value, you are heading in the wrong direction. 

The right is to have a comprehensive understanding of how to measure software development productivity, you will need to keep track of business and agile metrics. 

• Agile metrics should be able to measure different aspects of the development process. 
• Business/app-specific metrics should clear you how consumers are using your product and whether it’s catering for the market need. 

So, ensure your business success is your ultimate metric of measuring productivity, with following questions: 

• Is your customer happy?
• Did you meet the deadlines?
• How quickly your business results improve?

To get data-backed quick-fixes to these questions you will need to include specific success criteria for each product needed, for example – adoption rate by end-user, and also map these success criteria to your project’s metrics.  

Here’s The Metrics To Consider For Optimizing Software Delivery 

Sprint Burndown Reports

Sprint Burndown Reports : Whether you believe it or not, these reports are a significant metric in agile scrum methodology.

As most of you would be already aware, a sprint refers to a specific period of almost 1-4 weeks during which software developers in Dubai plan and sketch their tasks completely. And, at the end of each sprint, the development team reports to the project manager with the progress they have made during the sprint time. 

By keeping track of this metric, you can easily have access to important insights:

• Consistently missed sprint deadlines, on the contrary, can imply a gap in your planning and the fact that your team is asked to deliver a heap of work in minimum time. 
• Constant early sprint finishes can portray a lack of scheduled work for one sprint.
• Remember, your report should feature a steep reduction in “remaining values” instead of a dramatic drop, as the latter will present that the work was not assigned in gritty pieces.  

2. Throughput

Throughput present the complete value-added work output by the team. It’s conventionally represented by the units of work or tickets the team has completed within a set period of time. Moreover, you should align your throughput metric with your current business goals.

But, if your goal is to release fresh bug-free modules in this sprint, you should see a big fraction of defect tickets being resolved and the list goes on. Here, are a handful of benefits that come along Throughput: 

• Find when the team is blocked as the Throughput metric drops.
• Understand when the team is overflooded in comparison to the average Throughput against the current workload. 

So, if you are ready to take one step ahead, you can track additional software development performance metrics like Todd DeCapua, Chief technology evangelist for App Development Management (ADM) did at HP. His professionals managed to accomplish a 25% annual uphold in code quality and 100% increase in Throughput by re-writing software quality based on the following metrics:

• Date of delivery
• Code integrity
• Cancelled defects that removed wasted Q&A time.
• Communication quality
• Customer and operation impact of defects
• The capability of system to cater service levels

3. Cycle Time

Cycle Time refers to the total time that elapses from the moment when the work starts on a specific product until its completion. 

Opting for Cycle Time can help you gauge how much time your team takes to find an appropriate solution for the issues and move ahead or whether your team is skilled to manage multiple problems while the development goes on. 

Many software companies in Dubai use this metric to track how fast their teams can create new features.

Undoubtedly, with the quick insights gained by consistently tracking cycle time for bugs as well as adding features, you will start coming up with more precise and accurate predictions that need to be shared with the clients ASAP!

For example, by understanding your average bug cycle time, you can easily communicate the right expectations to the users. Also, you can measure your average feature cycle time, manage stakeholders expectations and gratify concise forecasts. 

The Final Thought

Hopefully, these metrics, along with productivity tips, would prove beneficial to mould your software development team into a competent, dedicated and efficient team.

Although, it’s equally vital for you to hire a software developer that as a leader, ensures that the team isn’t overburdened with heaps of work all the time. Set quickly accomplishable expectations and target gradual improvement. Else, you won’t realize when over-ambition aim will begin to be counterproductive.