Understand where your engineering teams' time goes and strike the right balance between new feature development, maintenance, and/or any other types of work you'd like to track.
Most non-technical executives believe that the engineering team spends all day every day building new features. They don't understand how much time goes into keeping the existing software operational, making productivity improvements, and fixing bugs — among other things.
Swarmia makes all this work visible. It automatically combines data from your source code hosting and issue tracker to give you an accurate picture of where engineering time is spent.
Visibility is only the first part of the puzzle. Once you have reliable data on how much time you've dedicated to the highest priorities in the past, you'll be able to create realistic estimates and start informed conversations about next steps.
Over time, investment distribution will allow you to improve the business impact of engineering. If, for instance, you notice that a team is spending a large chunk of their time on maintenance work, you might want to invest in architectural changes and/or automation that will free up more time for roadmap work in the future.
Leading an engineering organization is a balancing act. Your goal is to get the right stuff done as quickly as possible — but without sacrificing quality or burning out your developers.
Investment distribution can shed light on under-invested product areas and/or teams, so you can proactively solve bottlenecks, strike the perfect balance between different priorities, and ultimately, build a healty, well-balanced engineering organization.
“With Swarmia, we're able to highlight problem areas, set target levels, and drive continuous improvement.”
Instead of forcing you to track some pre-defined categories of work, you can freely choose and customize the investment categories you'd like to track in Swarmia. The categories are mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive — and you define what works goes where.
Once you've set the rules for categorizing pull requests and issues, Swarmia does the categorization for you. If there's ever any work that doesn't automatically fall into any of the categories, developers can assign their PRs to the right category in Slack.
If you want to see which pull requests and issues belong to each investment category, you can always drill down into each of the categories. There's no secret sauce, algorithm, or “AI” behind the grouping, which means you can always trust the data you get.
When you're looking to build a high-performing engineering team, getting visibility into where the teams' time goes is the first step. But to really adopt continuous improvement, you also need to track healthy software development metrics.