Modern software engineering organizations are agile. They are focused on delivering value rapidly by using continuous delivery, integration and improvement. As such, metrics have changed from more static, traditional software-quality metrics (e.g. Lines of Code/hour) to metrics that help measure continuous success and value creation.
"Measuring software productivity by lines of code is like measuring progress on an airplane by how much it weighs." - Bill Gates
Modern software engineering organizations have changed. But measuring processes still remains a fundamental practice to them. Metrics help modern software engineering teams review their progress, compare it to past activity, and analyze it to improve their performance. They are used to make quantitative and qualitative decisions, and to assess and reduce risk within software engineering projects.
Let’s look at the advantages and disadvantages of using metrics to make better decisions in software engineering.
For metrics to be useful to a modern software engineering organization they have to be linked to business and engineering objectives. Ideally, measurements should evolve the understanding of the organization.
They need to have the following aspects defined:
As opposed to manufacturing, software development produces unique products (or features in the same product) over and over. As such, nothing we can measure has a predictive value in isolation. This means that only trends in objective metrics remain useful, and the only valid comparison is relative to how you engineered before and after now.
Software engineering organizations benefit in the following ways:
To consistently create engineering value, effective decisions on where to engineer need to be made every day. Decision making quality is based on information availability, its collection and analysis. When not using metrics, information quality and availability is reduced. This increases the need for decisions to be taken based on human traits such as personal bias and overgeneralizations. These can reduce the quality of your decision making and make you draw wrong conclusions.
How Metrics Benefit 3 Types of Engineering Leaders In An Org
Athenian understands the value that metrics have for modern software engineering organizations. We have seen the benefits that these provide to all levels of seniority and how they reduce inconsistencies in decision making among them.
To access the true value of metrics, you can use the Athenian Software Delivery dashboard. It will allow you to: