6 Essential KPIs for Software Development
It’s time to get serious about software development. Whether your company is in the business of building products or delivering services, you can’t afford not to monitor and improve your performance every day. KPIs are a great way to track progress as it happens.
Here are some key performance indicators (KPIs) that you should keep an eye on if you’re developing software:
Feature velocity.
Feature velocity is the number of features added to your product in a given time period. It’s a measure of how fast you’re developing, and it can be used to predict future performance.
To get started tracking feature velocity, start by creating a list of all the features that have been added over the past few months or years. Then, calculate their total weight — for example, if there are 100 features on your platform right now and they each take an average of 10 hours to develop (meaning it takes 1,000 hours just to write them all), then that would give you 100/1,000 = 0.10 feature velocity.
While this sounds like simple math (and it is!), there are many factors that affect how quickly you can add new features: how technical they are; whether they require coding changes or database updates; what type of resources those tasks require; how much time those tasks take; whether the feature requires testing before deployment; etc.
Cycle time and lead time.
Cycle time and lead time are both important metrics. Cycle time refers to the amount of time it takes for a single process to complete from start to finish. Lead time, on the other hand, refers to the amount of time it takes for a process to complete from start-to-finish in its entirety — including all steps leading up to the final step in that process.
Lead times can be calculated by taking your total project duration (calculated by summing up all tasks) and dividing it by your number of tasks (that is: total project duration / number of tasks). This will give you an average lead time per task in days or weeks depending on how granularly you want to measure your figures; however, if you’re looking at a whole project instead of individual tasks then simply use “months” instead so they aren’t confused with task durations.
Release Burndown
Release burndown is a critical KPI for software developers that notes the entire release progress. In addition, this metric can assist team leads in guiding their members in managing the release of the final product. In release burndown charts, the x-axis shows sprints while the y-axis represents story points.
You can utilize a release burndown chart to ascertain whether you are working as per schedule. In addition, you can have accurate data on hand to show stakeholders when they can expect an ROI post-release. Likewise, you can update enthusiastic customers about delays or early releases.
The release burndown chart allows you to visualize your project’s progress over time. You will be able to see how much work has been done since last week or month and how much work has been done since inception of project. This information helps in making better decisions about future development efforts and helps improve productivity by providing clear direction for team members on where they should focus their efforts at any given point of time during project development cycle
Time to market.
Time to market is the time it takes to get a product or service from the initial idea to the customer. A product or service can take anywhere from six months to three years for development before it’s ready for launch, so this is something you’ll want to keep track of closely.
It’s important that you understand how long it takes for your team and products to go through this process so that you know if there is any room for improvement in your workflow or planning processes. Time-to-market metrics will help you determine if your current strategy makes sense based on these factors:
- What are competitors doing?
- How much money do they have?
Accuracy in estimation.
Everyone knows that estimation is a very important part of software development, but it’s not an exact science. In fact, there are many ways in which an estimation can be inaccurate. If your team isn’t able to get their estimates right, then they aren’t working as efficiently as possible and this will impact the quality of their output.
Accuracy in estimation is a key indicator of how well your team works together and thus how efficient they are at producing results. For example: if you have two developers working on one project with different levels of experience and knowledge, then their estimations will vary depending on which parts of the project each developer specializes in.
Load testing and performance testing results.
Load testing is a simulation of user activity on the application, including load patterns such as page views and user interactions. It can help you determine the capacity of your system by simulating real-world usage in order to measure how it performs under different conditions.
Performance testing measures the performance of your application based on real-world usage scenarios (such as web pages with various elements), allowing you to identify bottlenecks or other issues that may impact users’ ability to perform their tasks efficiently.
Customer feedback on design and customer support.
You can also track customer feedback on design and support by using surveys. This is a good way to gauge how well customers are being served, and what areas you should focus on improving.
Customer satisfaction, retention and conversion are all important KPIs for determining the effectiveness of your software development business.
Keep an eye on the right KPIs to predict and improve performance.
Successful software development teams use KPIs to measure the success of projects and products. They also use them to predict future performance by looking at historical data. This helps guide decision-making throughout the process, from defining requirements to making tradeoff decisions along the way.
Conclusion
The key takeaways for software development teams are to keep track of your most important KPIs and make sure that they are being monitored on a regular basis. This will help you identify bottlenecks, improve performance and predict future outcomes more accurately.
