Should you measure your developers?
Measuring your team performance is not an easy task.
There are a lot of metrics out there for measuring developers, teams and their overall success in delivering a quality product (or project).
The question is SHOULD you measure your developers? Do developers like to be measured and get this kind of feedback about their work?
People are different. Trying to hold everybody to the same standard, metric or KPI will not ensure that the data you’ll get will be accurate and reliable.
You probably heard the famous saying : “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid”.
In addition, not all individuals like to be measured.
Some will embrace the feedback and some might consider it a criticism regarding their work.
As a team / group leader, you should strive to get better but do metrics tell the real story? Will you team embrace them and try to get better?
So, should you measure your developers and team performance using metrics?
Absolutely. A big part of bigger a manager and a leader is the will to get better each and every day and each and every task or project.
It will benefit the product by reducing the time it takes to deliver AND it will create a better product overall.
It will benefit the developers as they should strive to be better at their craft and it will be better for the team, setting the culture as a team that is working together to get better.
It’s all about setting up expectations. You should gather the team and explain (in detail) why and how those metrics will come to place.
You should hear them out, does your metrics and KPIs align with theirs?
Do they fully understand why those metrics are important to you and the company?
Do they feel those metrics and KPIs will help them grow and get better as individuals and as a team?
It might take several meetings and even several weeks, but in the end, they should be on-board. If not, you should keep investing in getting the team on board before actually starting implementing and gathering the data from the metrics and KPIs.
OK, so the team is on board with my crazy ideas. What now?
Metrics are just tools, KPIs are the real objective. You might have fancy metrics using data you gathered for months but if they don’t help you measure your KPI and move forward to accomplish it, they are useless.
Here’s Some examples of common KPIs for software development teams:
- Number of active bugs in the production
- Time to close a PR (pull request)
- Number of times master build fails with in a time period (day, month)
- Average downtime
- Cloud computing cost per hour for a user
If you are having a problem setting those KPIs, you can always start from the CEO or the product team. Take their KPIs and try to create your own that might align to their.
In the next article, we’ll start a series of getting to know that most useful metrics you can implement in your team, in the meantime, focus on setting up team’s KPIs.

