High team productivity, for any organization, is a sign of healthy and efficient processes. When it comes to engineering management, nothing stagnates team progress and efficiency more than a disoriented and disrupted workflow. 

With a multitude of distractions hindering developers’ focus and with the complexities of managing hybrid teams; productivity tools have become vital to efficient engineering management.

The objective for productivity tools is to eliminate existing or possible interruptions and help developers to preserve and protect focus time and deep work for better productivity. But at the same time, managers and leaders have to stay mindful of what metrics they aim to measure & manage. Hence, when it comes to assessing developer productivity, you need to have a thorough understanding of the metrics, data, and dashboard to choose the right tool that best suits your business and your team’s workflow. 

What is software developer productivity? 

In a software engineering team, metrics are plenty. There are lines of code, pull requests, code reviews, number of commits, and other metrics that can be tracked. But no single metric can provide a complete understanding of developer productivity. 

Developer productivity tells us how productive a developer is within a given function or time. However, it isn’t an easy task to determine productivity for software developers. For instance, evaluating developer productivity with the number of outputs per developer could be a misfire. One developer may perform a task with several errors, but within a single day. While another takes twice the time to finish the same task but delivers error-free and superb code. 

Let’s take an example: Morgan deploys 5 times with 10 bugs in a day. On the other hand, Stanley deploys only 2 times with only 4 bugs a day. In this scenario, a manager wouldn’t be able to determine who’s more productive, since:

• You don’t know whether or not both the developers are working on the same build.
• Don’t know the code quality.
• You don’t know the criticality of the bugs.

The list can go on. It is tricky to assess the situation without data-driven insights to arrive at meaningful solutions. However, with the right metrics, you can develop factual visibility to measure and improve developer productivity. 

Tools to promote developer productivity:

Hatica

Hatica provides a comprehensive dashboard of all metrics that are involved in measuring and managing the productivity of engineers effectively. The Hatica accelerates velocity and assures substantial cycle time reduction, enhancing focus time and deep work; thus integrating business goals with work processes. With versatile widgets that span several team metrics such as cycle time, effort allocation, team communication, collaboration, etc.;  the platform provides data-driven insights for engineering team management. 

Also, with Hatica, engineering leaders can get high-level insights for assessing development progress, visibility into bottlenecks, and the ability to effectively manage weekly or daily progress. With a combination of Git, project, and collaboration data; Hatica provides valuable insights into development workflows, improving developer productivity and efficiency.   

Hatica’s preconfigured dashboards can help teams get started right at setup. What’s more, teams can also easily customize the dashboard as per team structure and requirements. This helps engineering managers get more accurate and relevant insights and visibility towards building high-performing engineering teams.

GitClear 

Gitclear provides developer metrics that help engineering leaders to promote better productivity amongst their developers. By creating incentives to reduce tech debt and ship faster, developers are not only incentivized to be more effective but also more productive and collaborative. The tool allows managers a vantage point into the activity of developers using data insights into developer location, seniority, country, and much more. It also helps to better the review process by summarizing the code. 

Pinpoint 

Pinpoint is a developer productivity tool that helps engineering managers build products fast, It helps to compare team performances using multiple data sources. It also provides metrics such as defect rate, cycle time, on-time delivery, etc. 

Code Climate 

Code Climate’s Velocity developer productivity tool provides a variety of features that help engineering leaders align their teams’ efforts with business strategy and goals. Metrics derived from analytics on Jira and DevOps tools provide insights into team operations that can then be used to align engineering initiatives with routine standups to larger strategic initiatives such as roadmap decisions. 

Sleeek 

Sleeek is a chatbot application for Slack that combines projects metrics and communication data to derive user sentiment and user behavior analytics to provide reliable information about project status and progress. It interprets various project metrics and communication data and provides useful information for the project manager that normally takes a lot of time.

Wrapping Up

Managing developer productivity is a critical priority of engineering managers and leaders. Although it can be tricky, with the use of the right metrics and effective tools like Hatica, engineering leaders can have a better grip on their teams and promote better and sustainable productivity.