How software engineering intelligence platforms boost developer productivity

In today’s fast-paced software industry, engineering organizations need objective measurements and analytical solutions to gauge their performance. Historically, engineering leaders have evaluated outcomes subjectively, lacking the data-driven insights required to drive success. This has hindered engineering leaders from making informed decisions to enhance their teams’ performance and achieve desired outcomes.

Amidst this challenge, many organizations struggle to meet their software project goals. According to the Standish Group’s 2020 CHAOS report, which is based on a database of 50,000 software projects, only 35% were successfully delivered on time and within budget. This statistic highlights the consequences of inadequate engineering measurement practices and the need to adopt effective solutions.

Understanding software engineering intelligence platforms

Software engineering intelligence (SEI) platforms, such as Code Climate’s Velocity, address these concerns by providing critical visibility into engineering organizations. Engineering leaders no longer need to rely on gut feelings or unreliable manual data-gathering to make critical decisions. SEI platforms enable engineering leaders to access, analyze, and interpret data for better decision-making and project outcomes. By leveraging these platforms, engineering teams can unlock valuable insights, identify potential bottlenecks, and foster greater efficiency and software development success.

Velocity is designed for large enterprises with complex organizational structures, including those with hundreds of teams, third-party contractors, and project-based resources. It integrates with various engineering systems, including version control systems, project management platforms, and communication tools like Slack. And it automatically and securely ingests, cleans, and links data to surface actionable insights from an engineering team’s data.

The platform scales to meet the demands of these large organizations. Velocity ingests and normalizes data from up to 5,000 contributors and 30,000 repositories per organization by sorting and matching user identities across tools and repositories. Its back-end infrastructure uses multiple data storage technologies (Amazon S3 and Postgres) and data streams (Amazon Kinesis) to route a high volume of messages.

As large organizations often have many teams with multiple working styles, Velocity is configurable to suit different roles and needs, offering autonomy for each engineering team to have control over how they use metrics to improve their performance. Velocity ensures that the right people have the correct access to team information with role-based access controls and custom permissions. It also has read/write capabilities, allowing engineering teams to add their unique business context and tailor the platform to meet their organization’s specific requirements.

Benefits of software engineering intelligence platforms

SEI platforms empower managers to gain real-time insights into their team’s progress, eliminating unnecessary meetings and constant check-ins. By breaking down silos and providing a clear view of everyone’s workload, SEI platforms foster greater team autonomy, allowing them to receive assistance when needed so they can operate more efficiently.

The following benefits collectively contribute to more efficient and successful software development processes:

• Visibility and predictability: Particularly in large or complex organizations, it can be difficult to gain visibility into the work of engineering teams. SEI platforms ingest, link, and analyze data from the tools engineers already use to help leaders understand where teams are spending their time, and proactively address potential issues like scope creep and unplanned work.
• Improved team health, collaboration, and developer retention: Maintaining a healthy and engaged engineering team is essential for sustainable success. SEI platforms help leaders understand how their team is working, so they can help prevent burnout, identify opportunities for collaboration, and encourage actionable coaching conversations based on objective data.
• Improved speed and efficiency of the software development life cycle (SDLC): Even in highly efficient and high-performing organizations, some projects may experience delays or budget overruns, and it can be hard to understand and communicate why. SEI platforms can help leaders spot recurring bottlenecks or inefficiencies and work with their teams to improve the relevant processes. They also make it possible to test the efficacy of process changes. For example, a team experimenting with incorporating AI into their workflow can use an SEI platform to understand its impact on their efficiency and productivity.
• Building a culture of engineering excellence: To create an environment of engineering excellence, leaders need insights that allow them to set effective goals, identify areas for improvement, and celebrate success. With an SEI platform, it’s also possible to measure progress against industry benchmarks and leverage established frameworks like DORA metrics.

Leveraging data for actionable insights

Specific metrics provided by SEI platforms allow engineering leaders to assess the quality of their team’s work, evaluate code review practices, and maintain stability and efficiency in software delivery. Visualizations of trends, patterns, and correlations from these metrics offer valuable insights to engineering leaders, leading to informed decision-making.

Code Climate’s Velocity offers more than 60 metrics, including the following core metrics:

• Cycle time: Calculates when the first commit is authored to when a pull request is merged, representing how quickly software is delivered to customers.
• DORA metrics: These are industry standards, consisting of deployment frequency, mean lead time for changes, change failure rate, and mean time to recovery, that provide insights into a team’s speed, quality, and agility. These metrics help leaders benchmark team performance, monitor trends, and compare against the industry. Leaders need to consider DORA metrics within the context of other engineering metrics to gain a comprehensive view of a team’s effectiveness for long-term success.
• Rework: Reflects how much an individual contributor edits their code within three weeks after pushing. If someone has a high rework percentage compared to peers, leaders may consider pairing them with a more experienced developer for guidance.
• Pull requests merged: Measures the frequency of delivering value to customers. A dip in pull requests merged may indicate a productivity lapse due to recent changes, such as a new code review policy needing reevaluation.
• Abandoned pull requests: Indicates the number of untouched pull requests for over three days, suggesting wasted efforts. Leaders can investigate further to identify any lack of clarity in feature implementation and consider setting best practices or limiting story points.
• Work in progress/contributor: Shows the ratio of open pull requests to active contributors, which may reveal if the team is spread too thin. Leaders may re-prioritize the sprint and reduce the workload if the ratio exceeds normal.

In the digital era, software engineering intelligence has become a critical asset for organizations seeking to optimize their engineering practices and deliver value. SEI platforms like Velocity provide engineering leaders with the necessary data-driven insights to make informed decisions, foster team health and collaboration, and demonstrate the impact of their work on business outcomes.

Using SEI platforms, engineering organizations can overcome challenges, maximize productivity, and gain a competitive edge in the ever-evolving software industry. As technology continues to shape the future of businesses, adopting SEI platforms will be instrumental in driving success and staying ahead in the race to deliver innovative and high-quality software solutions.

Madison Unell is a senior product manager at Code Climate. She is a seasoned senior product manager with nearly a decade of experience leading cross-functional teams to build and deliver innovative software solutions that solve complex problems in complex industries.

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