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Swarmia Blog

Latest articles

Engineering benchmarks: A guide to reducing lead time to change

Rebecca Murphey · Aug 8, 2024

Lead time to change — the time between when a task is started and when the resulting code is in production — is one of the fundamental indicators of team health. When the time to get work to…

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Engineering benchmarks: A guide to improving time to deploy

Rebecca Murphey · Jun 14, 2024

When you’re trying to improve the effectiveness of your software engineering organization, a handful of metrics can help you identify specific opportunities. One of those metrics is time to…

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32 questions to ask in your developer experience surveys

Miikka Holkeri · Jun 5, 2024

“I inherited a developer experience team and was supposed to be in charge of understanding our development lifecycle and its pain points. I had no idea how to gather that information. I…

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Structuring engineering organizations

Otto Hilska · May 29, 2024

Have you ever worked for a new startup with just a couple of developers? It’s pretty amazing, for a while. You know everything about the business domain. You know the whole codebase because…

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Engineering benchmarks: A guide to improving flow efficiency

Rebecca Murphey · May 24, 2024

When you’re trying to improve the effectiveness of your software engineering organization, a handful of metrics can help you identify specific opportunities. One of those metrics is flow…

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Sensible benchmarks for evaluating the effectiveness of your engineering organization

Rebecca Murphey · Mar 15, 2024

If you’re digging into engineering metrics for the first time, it can be hard to know what “good” looks like. The urge is strong to find a way to compare yourself to other companies using…

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Minimizing noise and bias in developer surveys

Miikka Holkeri · Feb 20, 2024

“The world is full of well-meaning people who believe that anyone who can write plain English and has a modicum of common sense can produce a good questionnaire.” — A. N. Oppenheim…

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Identify and eliminate common productivity bottlenecks for engineering teams

Rebecca Murphey · Feb 14, 2024

If you’re an engineering manager and you haven’t been asked lately about your team’s productivity, consider yourself lucky: optimizing the value created by an engineering organization seems to…

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What good Continuous Integration (CI) looks like

Jarno Rantanen · Jan 3, 2024

Continuous Integration (CI) is the process of integrating work from multiple developers, and assuring its quality automatically. It’s an integral component of any modern development effort, as…

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Welcoming a record number of new customers and a slew of key features — our year in review

Otto Hilska · Dec 20, 2023

2023 was a year of change and growth for us as we set our sights on supporting more leadership use cases, grew the team with several key hires, and introduced a slew of new features to the…

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Gaining visibility and control over cross-team initiatives

Rebecca Murphey · Dec 4, 2023

Once a software engineering organization has a few teams, engineering leaders are called upon to manage projects that span those teams. It’s not just about keeping tabs on what each team is up…

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Reduce interruptions to help engineers stay in flow

Rebecca Murphey · Oct 30, 2023

Interruptions — anything that yanks a developer out of that elusive “flow” state — can appear out of nowhere. They’re often untracked and underestimated in their ability to derail focus and…

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Engineering leaders share their wins and challenges in evaluating team performance

Rebecca Murphey · Oct 16, 2023

Earlier this year, Swarmia and LeadDev partnered with a research firm to understand the metrics that software engineering teams rely on and the bottlenecks they are struggling with. The work…

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Paper cuts and bad days: Improving developer experience by listening to engineers

Rebecca Murphey · Sep 21, 2023

Before joining Swarmia, I worked at Stripe for two years in its developer productivity organization. The single most interesting thing I got to work on was the engineering effectiveness…

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Should you track DORA metrics for mobile apps?

Ari-Pekka Koponen · Aug 29, 2023

Within the last few years, using the four key DORA metrics has become one of the most popular ways of tracking software delivery performance. As always, trends and popularity don’t come…

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BRAINS: A roadmap toward a more effective engineering organization

Rebecca Murphey · Aug 9, 2023

There’s plenty of content out there on what we’re coming around to calling “engineering effectiveness,” the work of ensuring that an engineering organization is delivering on business outcomes…

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When to start a platform team? Probably sometime around now

Rebecca Murphey · Jul 7, 2023

Once you have more than a couple of teams, you already have an internal developer platform , whether you know it or not. It exists as bash scripts, troubleshooting docs, the three slightly…

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Building software the Swarmia way

Hugo Kiiski · Jun 8, 2023

At Swarmia, we get to see hundreds of different development workflows from our customers, and have greatly enjoyed learning from them. We felt that it would be appropriate for us to return the…

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More than surveys: Capturing real-time data about developer experience

Rebecca Murphey · May 15, 2023

When you’re working on improving developer experience , one of the most challenging parts of the job is to prove that the work you’re doing is the right work, and that it’s having a real…

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Making the case for investing in developer experience

Rebecca Murphey · Apr 12, 2023

If you’re a savvy engineer or engineering manager at a company with a growing team (or just a growing codebase), chances are good that you’re already part of conversations happening about the…

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Talking to your engineering team about improving productivity

Rebecca Murphey · Mar 16, 2023

If there’s one thing I’ve taken away from my time as an engineering manager, and later as a product manager, it’s this: Talking about difficult topics is scary, and generally also actually the…

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Bringing visibility into a developer’s work in a healthy way

Hugo Kiiski · Mar 15, 2023

Insights on an individual developer can be a scary topic. As developers, we’re often understandably allergic to the thought of our work being watched and evaluated. However, we probably also…

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Beyond spreadsheets: Driving developer productivity improvements using goals, signals, and metrics

Rebecca Murphey · Mar 7, 2023

So many developer productivity journeys start with a spreadsheet. Quickly or eventually, that spreadsheet evolves into a tool for tracking metrics across teams. Next thing you know, you’re…

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The ultimate guide to developer experience

Ari-Pekka Koponen · Feb 28, 2023

Understanding developer experience is vital when you want to improve the work engagement and productivity of the developers within your engineering organization. We'll cover what developer…

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Size, age, culture: 3 factors that will shape your productivity path

Rebecca Murphey · Feb 13, 2023

I’ve spent my first few weeks at Swarmia listening in on a lot of customer calls, and talking to many other software companies myself. It’s been a good reminder that every company’s…

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Practical advice for driving continuous improvement in software teams

Mandy Dye · Jan 23, 2023

As a Customer Success Manager here at Swarmia, I get to work with engineering organizations from some of the most impressive technology companies in the world. And over time, I’ve noticed…

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5x the customers and 38 new features — our year in review

Otto Hilska · Dec 28, 2022

At Swarmia, we’re all about helping modern engineering teams build great products, start better conversations, and create a culture of continuous improvement. And since 2022 was a year full of…

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Swarmia is now SOC 2 Type 2 compliant

Oskari Virtaoja · Dec 16, 2022

Ever since Swarmia was founded in November 2019, protecting our customers’ data has been a priority for us. After all, there’s no way we would be able to work with modern engineering…

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How we use Swarmia at Swarmia

Hugo Kiiski · Dec 8, 2022

When looking at a product like Swarmia, it can be hard to see how to put the theory into practice. In this blog post, I'll share how we use Swarmia to make our engineering team work better…

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How to make time for improving software development productivity

Otto Hilska · Nov 30, 2022

An engineering leader recently told me: “ I'd love to start improving our ways of working, but we need to ship a couple of features by the end of the year. ” While it would be tempting to…

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Managing complex business logic in SQL using Common Table Expressions (CTEs)

Eemeli Kantola · Oct 12, 2022

Let’s say you have a data-intensive app with a bunch of complicated querying needs. As things progress and your needs expand, the data access code might start getting more or less…

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Are daily stand-ups a waste of time?

Mika Vakula · Sep 15, 2022

If your daily stand-ups feel like a waste of time, they probably are. Here’s what’s wrong with most stand-ups — and what you can do about it. Here’s what’s wrong with daily stand-ups It…

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Why cycle time is a better metric than velocity

Eero Kettunen · Aug 31, 2022

Cycle time and velocity are both commonly used to measure and improve software teams’ ability to estimate how long it will take for them to complete a piece of work. While both metrics have…

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Your organization’s guide to the SPACE framework

Ari-Pekka Koponen · Jul 28, 2022

We’ve helped hundreds of organizations build a more complete picture of development productivity. This guide on the SPACE framework of developer productivity explains the framework, what we’ve…

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Creating the best GitHub experience on Slack

Hugo Kiiski · Jul 14, 2022

When we started building Swarmia, we found a surprising lack of Slack tooling for GitHub, the biggest developer platform out there. Why weren’t there good Slack notifications and interactions…

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You don’t need a Git analytics tool

Otto Hilska · Jun 21, 2022

I have a confession to make: I used to be a customer of an early Git analytics vendor. But I’d be lying if I told you that there were no warning signs. In fact, before I bought the tool, their…

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DORA change failure rate – what, why, and how

Ari-Pekka Koponen · Jun 9, 2022

Out of all the four DORA metrics, change failure rate is the one causing the most headache to engineering organizations. At Swarmia, we’ve spent quite a bit of time making sure we get it right…

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Debugging Apollo GraphQL MockedProvider

Kimmo Brunfeldt · Jun 3, 2022

We’re big on Apollo GraphQL here at Swarmia, but we’ve sometimes struggled with mocking. And based on these comments, it looks like we’re not alone . This blog post is here to help! Why…

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How to balance engineering investments — and not just keep the lights on?

Lauri Ikonen · May 25, 2022

One of the inescapable problems in software engineering has to do with balance. How do you balance the scales between new investments and keeping the existing software functional; how do you…

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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

Update (Dec 15, 2022): Swarmia is now officially SOC 2 Type 2 compliant . Ever since Swarmia was founded in October 2019, data security has been in our DNA. In fact, we performed our first…

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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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