Jul 14, 2023

How to measure the productivity of an engineering team

Fellow suggests the following 10 measures for engineering metrics. I agree some of them. Let me add my opinon in line. My opinion is based on current company situation that it releases every three months.

Lead time: Yes. It means from the time of customer request to the time of deployment in production.

Cycle time: Yes. It means from the time of staring of the developmnet to the time of deployment in production. However I would like to mearsure to the time of master branch merge.

Number of story points: Yes. I prefer to measure number of stories. Because story points are decided by engineers and it's not correct until the team gets stable. It takes about 1 or 2 years. The problem is after 1 or 2 years, engineers are not in the team.

Mean time to restore in production: No. Dev and Ops are separated. 

Days worked: Yes, but no. The formula of the productivity is output / input. We can use this as input. The challenge is engineers are in several countries. It's little bit hard to calculate work days with holidays of each country.

Context switching: No. There is no way to measure it objectively.

Deploy frequency: No. It should be YES, however current my company has fixed release cycle.

Change failure rate: Yes. I use this measure like defect count / total count of story and defect.

Rework ratio: No. There is no way to measure it objectively.

WIP balance: No. I don't want to measure the process. I prefer to measure the result.

https://fellow.app/blog/productivity/engineering-metrics-what-they-are-ways-to-measure-them/