Practical ideas to help you build better software faster

Change lead time or lead time for changes — 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…

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…

“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…

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…

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…

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…

“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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…