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The importance of KPI for software development is hard to overestimate. These indicators let you see if your employees do their best. You can also use them to evaluate each one of your developers.
KPIs will help you analyze the work done during a specified period. Use them to see if it is possible to improve your workflow. KPIs help you evaluate time, expenses, and client satisfaction. Meanwhile, software KPIs measure the quality of a program.
Having profound experience in software development, the Devox Software team will share its knowledge on the importance of KPIs in this article. Read on to learn how to leverage the power of KPIs for agile software development.
What Is A Software Development KPI?
KPIs let you see if the steps you took make you closer to the set goals. The task of a manager is to select the right KPIs for measuring the production processes. Then, using them, you can estimate if the team will deliver on its promises. KPIs might be difficult to understand, but you may use them to create charts.
The diversity of all KPIs for software development can be divided into the following types:
Why Are Metrics In Software Development Important For Your Business?
The agile software development culture means that teams must release product updates often. This is why it becomes crucial to pay attention to quality.
Optimized Way for Reaching Goals
According to statistics, 93% of business leaders consider progress measurement a vital factor influencing the final business outcome. KPIs help managers identify issues, track task completion, and prevent problem occurrence. As a result, you can optimize development and complete tasks more quickly.
Simplified Decision-Making
KPIs are important for any business because they allow for simplifying decision-making. As there are too many metrics, you need to pick the ones that provide you with relevant info. Use them to facilitate your operations and improve them.
Tracking the Product Quality and Development Process
Select the right metrics for your needs from the start. Some of the KPIs mentioned below will help you measure the quality of your products. Others are more suitable for analyzing the organization of the development process.
Disregard irrelevant metrics as they may distract you from crucial issues. To ensure that you set the right KPIs, check that they adhere to the S.M.A.R.T. goal-setting technique:
Benefits Of Software Development KPI Metrics
Do you want to improve your ROI or find areas for improvement? Analyze software KPI examples to make the workload manageable and reduce expenses. KPIs will help you plan your software development budget and stay within it. Software metrics allow you to see if you created a high-quality program.
Besides, it will help you perform the following tasks:
- Tracking the progress
- Streamlining your workflow
- Meeting the set deadlines
- Identifying areas of improvement
- Minimizing overtime
KPI metrics help team leads create informative charts and diagrams for stakeholders. They also provide invaluable insights for QA and development teams. Use them to calculate your expenses and evaluate your employees more efficiently.
Best KPI For Development Team
To measure efficiency in software development, you need to analyze KPIs. These metrics are vital for evaluating your productivity and reaching the set goals. The right indicators will provide you with meaningful insights for making improvements. Make sure to use fixed KPIs to spend less time on micromanagement.
All the KPIs have different values. But each of them plays a pivotal role in evaluating the development. We have rounded up the main metrics for assessing team productivity, software reliability, and usability.
While working on the projects, Devox Software always employs numerous KPIs to track the development process’s progress and quality. For example, while creating a wellness social network with a marketplace feature, we’ve been tracking spring burndown, release burndown, cycle time, and flow efficiency to understand how well we are progressing with this project.
Velocity
Velocity is one of the main software development key performance indicators. This KPI shows how many tasks your team can solve during one sprint. You can measure it either in hours or story points.
Use this metric to estimate the number of iterations your projects require and plan your sprints. It is better to use it together with other metrics, such as sprint and release burndown.
To calculate velocity, take into account the average speed of your team. It will enable you to predict how many iterations it will need to finish all the tasks. However, velocity doesn’t necessarily depend on professionalism and skill level.
Sprint Burndown
While velocity allows you to measure the KPI of your team for several sprints, this metric enables you to consider each separate sprint in detail. You can use it to estimate how many hours it will take your team to finish a sprint.
By comparing the completed tasks to the planned amount of work, you can visualize your processes more accurately. If you see a divergence between the two lines on a chart, your team might fail to meet the deadline.
Use this metric to keep an eye on processes and avoid lagging behind. It will help you detect the obstacles that might slow you down.
Release Burndown
Unlike sprint burndown and other software development KPI metrics, it shows what you need to do. Instead of analyzing one or multiple sprints, it demonstrates if you can release a program in time.
This metric is crucial for stakeholders. It allows them to estimate the likelihood of timely project completion. Typically, such charts contain information about the initial estimate. They allow you to see the actual achievements after the completion of each sprint. Analyze this metric and then ask your team to speed up its pace.
Cycle Time
It is one of the often mentioned software development KPI examples. Cycle time indicates how much time a team needs to spend to develop and deploy code. It describes the time a team needs to dedicate to a specific task.
Using the cycle time metric, you can measure the results of a team and its ability to meet set deadlines. Use it to compare the speed of multiple teams and their overall efficiency. This metric doesn’t allow measuring productivity. But it can reveal issues that prevent you from completing tasks on time.
Cumulative Flow
It is one of the best metrics for measuring KPIs for development team and analyzing workflow stability. People use it for creating informative charts. You can also use it to track solved tasks.
Cumulative flow enables you to analyze all the tasks of your projects. It shows how close to completion they are. Using this metric, a team can create an informative diagram for top management and stakeholders. It will contain all the necessary information on the task.
Flow Efficiency
Do you want to learn how to speed up your workflow and make it more efficient? Use the flow efficiency metrics. It allows you to measure software quality and build reliable products. To use such key performance indicators software developers need to run tests. Then, they can select a programming language that brings faster results.
Flow efficiency enables you to come up with a new strategy. To estimate it, you need to analyze:
- Lead time
- Working time
- Waiting time
You should rely on high-quality data and plan all the stages carefully to speed up work processes.
Code Coverage
Finally, you need to consider code coverage. It allows you to see if your software was thoroughly tested. This KPI shows how many lines of code were successfully validated. Using such KPI examples software development teams check the reliability of their products. This KPI also enables you to consider the security features of your program. In addition, code coverage lets you evaluate the maintainability of your software.
After entrusting the task of testing your software to the QA team, analyze testing results to see if it was effective. This metric will help you see if you created a top-quality software product. Use it to create high-quality programs that will help you get new loyal clients.
Final Thoughts
Analyze the KPIs mentioned on this list to set clear goals and evaluate your achievements. These indicators help engineering leaders optimize the workflow and make development teams more efficient.
By using these KPIs your organization can optimize all the development processes. By improving your performance, you can gain an excellent reputation in the market. Be consistent and rely on different KPIs to see the whole picture.
If tracking all these metrics seems like a challenging task for you, you can leverage the extensive experience and expertise of Devox Software to get professional web app development services. We are well aware of best practices in software development, so we can turn your most ambitious ideas into well-functioning products. Contact us today and become one step closer to your business goals tomorrow!
