Engineering metrics for high-performing teams
Swarmia gives engineering leaders, managers, and teams access to non-toxic engineering metrics — including DORA and SPACE. Here’s what you can (and can’t) measure with Swarmia.
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What type of engineering metrics can I measure with Swarmia?
Business impact
Quickly understand how much time your engineering organization is spending on different types of work.
Once you've established the optimal balance between roadmap work, chores, refactoring, firefighting, bug fixing, and unplanned work, you'll be able to use these insights to guide your engineering teams' focus.
Flow
Flow metrics like cycle time, cycle time for issues, and deployment frequency allow engineering teams to see how well the engine is running.
By analyzing outliers and periods of inactivity, you'll be able to recognize and resolve systemic issues that negatively impact throughput. Additionally, Swarmia's Slack notifications nudge your team to keep code flowing and cycle times low.
Team and code health
There are two ways you can look at the health of an engineering organization: the health of the team and the quality of the code they write.
Swarmia helps you build good habits like limiting work in progress, working together on bigger issues, and distributing code reviews evenly within the team. As for the health of the code, Swarmia also allows you to keep track of bugs and their share of all work.
“Swarmia gives us the perfect overview of engineering productivity. I can quickly see how we're doing in terms of cycle time and pull requests, which helps me report back to the business.”
You can't improve what you don't measure
Here are some of the engineering metrics you’ll see in Swarmia.
Cycle time
Understand how long it takes for your team to complete pull requests, tasks, stories, and epics.
Deployment frequency
Keep track of how often you're deploying — and how often the deployments are failing.
Investment distribution
Know what your engineering teams are working on and establish the right balance between roadmap work and other work.
Bug Insights
Stay on top of the bugs your team is working on and the time it takes to fix them.
Batch size
Keep your batch size small to roll out features to customers faster and with less risk.
CI insights
Spot flaky tests and improve the performance of your CI pipeline.
Review time
Identify review bottlenecks and get your work merged faster.
Review rate
Maintain high code quality by maximizing the percentage of code that gets reviewed before it's merged.
WIP limits
Allow teams to set their own work in progress limits to boost focus and productivity.
There are some things you can’t measure with Swarmia
Developer stack-ranking
Swarmia focuses on improving development productivity on the team and organization level. That's why you won't find developer leaderboards or other harmful activity metrics in Swarmia.
Lines of code (LOC)
Lines of code is a terrible measure of engineering productivity. In fact, Swarmia only records lines of code in the context of batch size and code review notifications. After all, we're all for shipping often and in small batches.
Code churn and rework
We believe that rewriting your own code is a perfectly acceptable way to solve complex problems. That's why you won't be able to track code churn or rework with Swarmia.
Explore next
Working Agreements
When it comes to building a high-performing engineering organization, tracking the right metrics is the first step. But to make sure the insights don't just sit on a dashboard, Swarmia also allows your teams to set their own working agreements and reminds them on Slack when they're about to slip.
