Swarmia Blog

Latest articles

Why small pull requests are better

Ari-Pekka Koponen · May 5, 2022

As a software engineer, I find myself creating large pull requests because it’s easy. Writing smaller pull requests takes practice. It also requires more of the boring planning part before I…

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How your software engineering team can ship 10x faster

Ari-Pekka Koponen · Apr 13, 2022

At Swarmia, we use the tagline "ship 10x faster.” To many, that sounds like an audacious claim. This blog post is the long footnote behind the asterisk ( * ) on that tagline. When we talk…

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Why investors should care about product development performance

Eero Kettunen · Mar 16, 2022

When you’re considering investing in an early stage software startup, it’s difficult to predict its future performance — especially if the market is already full of more established…

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Practical guide to DORA metrics

Otto Hilska · Mar 9, 2022

Ever since the book Accelerate was published in 2018, it’s been borderline impossible to have a conversation about measuring software development performance without any reference to the four…

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How software engineers can learn at work

Ari-Pekka Koponen · Jan 5, 2022

We know from multiple studies (e.g., 1 , 2 , 3 ) that learning at work improves both job satisfaction and organizational commitment. Both of these contribute to higher productivity and…

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Triple the teammates and 49 new features — our year in review

Otto Hilska · Dec 30, 2021

At Swarmia, we’re all about helping engineering teams ship better software faster by focusing on fewer things at a time. And our team is no exception. According to the story insights on…

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Tackling typical problems with issue cycle time

Eero Kettunen · Dec 21, 2021

The unfortunate reality about software development is that if you keep doing what you’ve been doing, you’ll start slowing down. When you first start building a product with a small team…

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Fixing the coffee situation at the office with lean and queuing theory

Otto Hilska · Dec 16, 2021

Coffee is an important ingredient in creating successful software development organizations. In this blog post, we explain how to to apply lean processes and queuing theory to brew enough…

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The essential guide to agile team working agreements

Ari-Pekka Koponen · Dec 8, 2021

Software development teams use working agreements to align their ways of working and improve collaboration. In this guide, we'll cover what working agreements are, why your team should…

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Why product teams should plan together — and how we do it at Swarmia

Lauri Ikonen · Nov 24, 2021

Planning is one of the skills that separates great product teams from the good ones. Teams that plan well are more likely to release in small and steady increments, build high-quality products…

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Swarmia is now SOC 2 compliant

Oskari Virtaoja · Nov 11, 2021

Ever since Swarmia was founded in October 2019, data security has been in our DNA. In fact, we performed our first internal security audits just one month after starting the company. Fast…

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Measuring software development productivity

Otto Hilska · Nov 9, 2021

The software world gave up too soon on measuring development productivity, deeming it impossible. A few years ago a new wave of research arrived that proved otherwise. After discussing the…

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Reduce bias in retrospectives with better data

Ari-Pekka Koponen · Oct 27, 2021

Many software organizations run retrospectives based on mostly subjective data collected from the retrospective participants. Studies show this leads to skewed insights that often miss broader…

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A complete guide to code reviews

Kimmo Brunfeldt · Oct 12, 2021

Code reviews are a widely accepted best practice for software development teams. In this post, we'll cover why the most successful teams use code reviews, how to adopt them in your development…

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Well-researched advice on software team productivity

Ari-Pekka Koponen · Oct 5, 2021

Understanding how individual people and productive teams behave is crucial for improving team performance. Often, it can be hard to distinguish ideological advice from insights grounded in…

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Busting the 10x software engineer myth

Ari-Pekka Koponen · Sep 21, 2021
A 10x engineer at work in Chernobyl. The Hollywood Archive / Avalon

Leaders often feel proud of their high performers. In reality, having "10x engineers" in your software organization may be a sign of an organization that is set out to fail in the long run. As…

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Hello World

Otto Hilska · Mar 22, 2021

What's needed to build a world-class product development organization? The common wisdom is to start with hiring the right people and empowering them. However, the often-forgotten part of the…

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