Engineering Excellence in Software Development: Metrics and Tools

How to measure the success and productivity of an engineering team? Which metrics to use? What is engineering excellence and how to achieve and preserve it?

If you are a manager in a software engineering organization, you must have asked yourself these questions. You probably already know that the key performance indicator is the delivered business value and customer satisfaction. However, these might be subjective, so let us consider some metrics and tools to help you develop a strong engineering culture and achieve high software quality.

What is Engineering Excellence?

While in the discovery phase, the focus is on building the right product, the one that fits the market, in the delivery phase the focus is shifted to building the product right, in a way that brings value. This is where engineering excellence plays a crucial role.

Engineering excellence is usually defined in terms of efficiency and effectiveness in delivering business value and satisfying customer needs. It requires continuous learning, collaboration, and adaptation to emerging technologies and changing customer needs. Software engineers must work together as interdisciplinary teams to formulate solution strategies, foster innovation, and create value for customers and stakeholders.

Strong engineering culture assumes continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous improvement. Engineering teams are expected to be agile, innovative, transparent, and diverse. The finished product must be reliable, efficient, maintainable, and secure.

To make it possible for individuals and teams to achieve engineering excellence, it is necessary to set it as a standard at the organizational level. Excellence should be promoted in all aspects of the organization. This is achieved by making excellence both the means and the ends of the organization's activities. Additionally, the organization has to make sure there are no obstacles that may be hindering progress. Also, it has to implement measures to support and motivate engineers to pursue excellence and achieve their full potential.

5 Steps to Achieve Engineering Excellence

1. Establish Clear Standards: Set clear and measurable standards for engineering excellence. This includes creating a code of conduct, defining coding standards, establishing quality assurance processes, and defining software testing and deployment expectations.

2. Foster Collaboration and Communication: Foster a collaborative work culture that encourages communication and teamwork. You should promote knowledge sharing, provide regular feedback, and create opportunities for cross-functional collaboration.

3. Encourage Continuous Learning: Provide access to training and development programs, promote knowledge sharing, and create a culture of continuous improvement. This helps ensure that engineering teams stay up-to-date with the latest tools and technologies and can adapt to changing business needs.

4. Emphasize Technical Excellence: Investing in software development best practices, such as agile development methodologies, DevOps practices, and continuous integration and delivery. This helps ensure that software is developed efficiently and effectively while meeting high-quality standards.

5. Use Data-Driven Metrics: Use data-driven metrics to track progress and measure success. This includes monitoring key performance indicators (KPIs), such as software quality, productivity, and customer satisfaction. Data-driven metrics help identify areas for improvement and ensure that engineering teams are delivering high-quality software that meets business objectives.

By following these steps, software development managers can promote engineering excellence within their organizations and ensure that their engineering teams are delivering high-quality software that meets business needs. At EPAM, we have successfully implemented this approach and have seen significant improvements in software quality, productivity, and customer satisfaction.

Metrics to Define Excellence

How do you know if you have reached engineering excellence? Are there any guidelines for teams to follow to achieve it? Is it possible to measure it and compare teams in terms of their engineering excellence?

Various metrics can be used as indicators of the level of excellence. However, each manager and team member should be aware of Goodhart's law which says "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." This means that improvement in metrics should never be the primary goal and the sole focus of a team. They should be used as a tool to measure progress towards the ultimate goal - providing business value and delivering delight to customers.

Good metrics are the ones a team can learn from and that are useful for driving improvements. It is necessary to apply the right metrics and monitor the right parameters to achieve success. For the sake of further analysis, we can make a distinction between process and production metrics. Let us have a closer look at each of them.

Delivery Process Metrics in Agile Software Engineering

Although these metrics do not directly measure the value added, they should be monitored as they provide insights regarding the planning and possible process improvements. Here are the key ones:

• Lead time refers to the time it takes for a development team to complete a task, from when a customer requests a feature or change until it is fully deployed and ready for use.

• Cycle time is part of lead time and indicates how long it takes for a task to move through the development process, from the moment work begins on the task until it is completed and ready for deployment.

• Velocity is the amount of work a development team can complete during a specified period, typically measured in story points, a measure of effort or complexity. It measures the team's capacity and productivity over time.

Production Metrics

After a product has been deployed into production, the team can collect data that track the software's performance, stability, and availability in a live environment. Some of the main production metrics include:

• Error rate measures the frequency and severity of errors or defects within the software.

• Availability refers to the percentage of time that the software is available and functioning correctly.

• Throughput is the rate at which the software is processing transactions or requests.

• Endpoint incidents refer to security incidents that occur at the endpoints (laptops, desktops, mobile devices, servers) using the software. This includes a variety of security incidents such as malware infections, phishing attacks, unauthorized access attempts, data breaches, and more.

• User satisfaction shows how satisfied users are with the software.

EPAM Solutions for Securing Engineering Excellence

EPAM has put decades of engineering and software delivery experience into developing solutions that can help EPAM as well as other clients achieve engineering excellence and reliable delivery. We know how important it is to ensure your team performs to the best of its abilities and how hard it can be to identify weak places and ways to improve them.

These battle-tested solutions can be applied and customized for almost any software development project helping managers make data-informed decisions quickly and reliably. TelescopeAI Perf is among the most popular.

TelescopeAI Perf

TelescopeAI Perf harmonizes data collected from all the systems used on a project providing full transparency about the team's performance. Managers can track the progress and measure productivity using indicators such as project summary, requirements, progress, velocity, engineering quality, estimation, workload, capacity, and compliance information.

Benefits:

• The project is delivered on time, within budget, bringing business value

• Code quality and overall productivity are closely monitored

• Clear insights are provided into all project processes signaling those that are underperforming

• The project’s ROI for cost and resource management is assessed

Summing Up

Finally, let us use a common analogy between engineering and sports teams. Just like continuous work and efforts make a sports team better, an engineering team can also achieve excellence by understanding the client’s problem first, then developing the strategy, plan, entire prototype, and finally business value.

It is a fact that engineering excellence is a key factor in the success of software development projects leading to higher-quality software, faster time-to-market, and greater customer satisfaction. As software development continues to play an increasingly important role in business success, engineering excellence will become a critical differentiator for companies looking to stay ahead of the competition.