Why Software Engineers Should Consider Engineering Analytics to Boost their Performance and Career

Tracking your progress and seeing the results of your work are essential as a software developer. Using engineering analytics will help you do both. Seeing how your work benefits the company will make you feel more valued. The ability to track your progress will also help you stay motivated and engaged. And most importantly, engineering analytics can help you influence many aspects such as the product roadmap, next features to develop, training courses, company-level solutions, and much more.

Any software developer can benefit from engineering analytics.

The field of engineering analytics deals with data analysis of development tools, such as Git repositories and project management tools. Our team at Keypup democratizes the term Development Intelligence, which is similar to Business Intelligence, but specifically applied to development. This link will take you to our e-book on Development Intelligence.

In this article, we will share some tips on how to leverage Development Intelligence to:

• Keep track of your progress and measure it
• Talk to your management about your assigned task
• Influence your next training or solution adoption
• Impact product roadmap
• Get promoted to a manager role

Using Development Intelligence to help you track and measure your progress

As a software developer, Development Intelligence can help you track and measure your progress in several ways. First, by tracking the number of completed pull requests, you can see how active you are and how your work is impacting the project. Additionally, by looking at the refactoring ratio (ratio of added and deleted lines of merged PRs), you can measure the scope of your work and ensure that you are making progress on features that are important to the company. Finally, by monitoring the Lead Time for Changes for each issue (time elapsed from open to closed issue), you can see how efficient you are at solving problems and identify areas where you could improve.

Using Development Intelligence to discussed assigned task with your management

Development Intelligence can also be used to discuss assigned tasks with your management. Your progress and successes can be evidenced by looking at the data. You can also use the data to provide factual context around areas where you seemingly had less success. This is a strong and objective way to ensure that you are getting the support you need from management. Follow this link to access a template insight providing you with all your unclosed pull requests and issues (directly pulled from your Git and/or PM tool).

Influencing the adoption of trainings and tools using Development Intelligence

Training and solutions can also be influenced by Development Intelligence. Data can be used to identify areas where training or development is needed. Additionally, if you see a new tool or solution that could improve your productivity, or help your team, you can use the data to build the case for its adoption. This template of overdue pull requests can help you identify those tasks taking longer to accomplish than expected and make a case of a need for training or tools.

Using Development Intelligence to influence product roadmap

It is also possible to influence the product roadmap using Development Intelligence. Looking at the data, you can see which features require a lot of bug fixes and refactoring. By knowing this information, you can prioritize your software development efforts and make sure you are building products that add value to your company. Plus, if you see a new feature you believe would be useful to avoid creating and fixing bugs elsewhere , you can use the data to defend  its inclusion in the roadmap.

Using Development Intelligence to influence your career progression

Last, but not least, Development Intelligence can be used to help you advance to management roles. By looking at the data, you can demonstrate to your management that you are capable of leading and making informed decisions. Furthermore, you can use the data to create an improvement plan if  you detect  areas where the team is struggling. Your management team will see that you are committed to helping them succeed and that you have the ability to lead them to success.

As a software developer, you can track and measure your progress with Development Intelligence. Additionally, you can use it to discuss tasks with management, influence future training and solutions, and even get promoted to a manager position. Development Intelligence is definitely something you should consider if you want to improve your productivity and effectiveness. 

Useful dashboard templates to help you get started with ease

Follow this link to access a software delivery dashboard template.

This dashboard will provide you with all the insights you need to measure and evaluate your overall velocity performance. It includes insights such as your deployment frequency, completed PRs, average PR size, PR lead time for changes, Issue queue time, overdue items and the list of your overdue unaddressed PRs.

Use this link to access a software quality dashboard template.

This dashboard will provide you with insights aimed to help you track and evaluate the overall software quality. It includes insights such as your PR review ratio, the average PR size, the recently raised bugs and how it’s trending over time, the refactoring ratio and how it trends over time as well as raised bugs by severity.

Finally, follow this link to access a developer assistant dashboard template.

This dashboard will grant you instant access to all insights you need to monitor your progress and priorities. It includes insights like your items in sprint, items organized by due date, merged PRs, average PR size, as well as your activity pipe.

Tell us how you track your overall performance via Twitter!