Dive into the critical metrics that define successful software development. From code quality to delivery speed, discover what really measures project success and drives results.
When it comes to software development, everything worth doing is also worth measuring. Following “gut feeling” often results in projects that don’t meet deliverables or go over budget throughout their development timeline. That's why any company looking to work with an IT outsourcing partner needs to be aware of the metrics of successful software development and treat them as a basic component of their project. This way, you can understand exactly when your development team does its best work and what factors contribute to it.
Using software development metrics is a great way to:
- Quantify outsourcing results so that both customers and suppliers can objectively evaluate a project's performance.
- Improve outsourcing efficiency and productivity and increase savings.
- Evaluate individual and team performance.
- Create more meaningful development estimates.
Types of Software Metrics
Code metrics
Lines of code, testing effort, instruction path length, and code complexity are great examples of these metrics. However, keep in mind that these are considered less useful by current IT outsourcing standards.
Productivity Metrics
Measuring the productivity of developers and software engineers can help you understand how much time and work developers are investing in a software project. Some common metrics are active hours, assignment scope, and code churn.
Agile Development Metrics
They measure the progress of a development team as it continues to produce shipping-quality, functional software features and their availability to the user. They vary depending on the agile methodology used, but are generally related to lead time, cycle time and velocity.
Operational Metrics
The operational side keeps software production under control and measures the team's effectiveness in maintaining it. The two main ones are Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) and Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR).
Test metrics
These measurements measure how thoroughly a system is tested. Often this is related to the quality of the software. Some examples are code coverage, bug rates, and percentage of automated tests.
Satisfaction Metrics
This is the most valuable measure to reveal important insights into customers’ experience and interaction with the product. Some customer satisfaction metrics are Customer Effort Score (CES), Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT).
Implementing Development Metrics
1 Metrics are for everyone
The metrics apply to both teams and management. Management should not impose metrics on the team. Instead, they should be intrinsically useful to teams so they can evaluate and improve their own work.
2 Get metrics on the conversation
Numbers are just numbers if we don't do something with them. Combining them into deeper discussions allows business leaders to make more informed decisions and tackle growth effectively.
3. Measure metrics with a purpose
Software metrics should be treated as if they were part of an experiment. The goal is for agile teams to use metrics with a specific hypothesis in mind, not measure for the sake of measuring.
Real-world software development metrics
Enterprise software can benefit your company in many ways.
1 delivery time
Lead Time refers to the amount of time it takes to go from idea to software. Lead time is typically reduced by simplifying decision making and reducing waiting times. This provides a more agile feel to your customers.
2 Cycle time
As part of Lead Time, Cycle Time refers to how long it takes to change something in your software system and deliver it into production. When teams use continuous delivery, their cycle times can even be measured in minutes rather than weeks.
3 Team Speed
Team velocity counts the number of “units” that are typically completed in a sprint or in a given iteration. However, speed is not a measure of success, as the metric is based on non-objective estimates. This number should only be used to plan iterations.
4 Opening/closing rates
Open/close rates measure the number of production issues that are reported and closed within a specific time period. The variation in this number is more important than the number itself.
5 MTBF
Statistically, systems are very likely to fail. When this happens, Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) should be treated as general performance measures in the system's current production environment.
6 MTTR
Mean Time to Recovery/Repair measures the time between the discovery of a security breach and a working solution. If it decreases over time, it means the team is more effective at understanding and fixing security issues.
7 Application crash rate
The application crash rate is the result of how many times the application crashes divided by how many times it was used. It reflects the business value delivered and the cost of remediating failures.
8 Endpoint Incidents
This measure counts how many endpoints (mobile devices, workstations, etc.) have suffered a virus infection during a given period of time. The fewer endpoint incidents, the better for everyone.
Getting started with software outsourcing
If you're considering working with an IT outsourcing company, it's essential to find the right option for you. As a starting point, consider your project timeline, identify your skills and available internal resources, set your budget, and establish clear goals and deliverables.
