KPIs for Software Engineering Teams

As a CTO, it's essential to track engineering teams' performance and how this translates into meeting business goals and KPIs (key performance indicators). This will help you identify problem areas, what needs to improve to meet your set goals and objectives, and how to drive success for your company in the long run. But how do you decide which metrics to track and what's more relevant for measuring KPIs? A KPI is a metric or a set of metrics, but not every metric is a KPI.

Waydev understands how important it is to understand which metrics are the most important for assessing your processes and improving vulnerable areas. Our solution enables you to assess essential metrics and analyze them automatically without requiring manual input from your team. Here is a breakdown of the ten most important metrics and KPIs that CTOs should keep track of over time:
1. Deployment Frequency (DF) - a DORA metric that shows how often your engineering teams deliver release quality code to production (that doesn't result in failures or downtime).
2. Deployment Time/Speed - it shows how long it takes to roll out deployments once they are approved
3. Change Failure Rate (CFR) - DORA metric indicating the percentage of released changes that don't result in bugs or downtime.
4. Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR) - an essential DORA metric that measures an engineering teams' response time in downtime (from the issue trigger moment until service is restored).
5. Lead Time for Changes (LTTC) - another DORA metric measuring how long your team takes to deliver new features.
6. Time to Detection - this KPI measures how long it takes for a team to identify an issue.
7. Defect Escape Rate - a KPI that is used to measure how many defects are detected during and after deployment.
8. Service Level Agreement Compliance - Service Level Agreement Compliance helps DevOps teams ensure that they respect the SLAs and meet expectations.
9. Unplanned Work Rate (UWR) - the KPI measures the time dedicated to unexpected efforts which have not been budgeted.
10. Cycle Time - this is a subsidiary of the previously mentioned Lead Time, and it measures how long the delivery process is from the first commit until the software release.

With Waydev, CTOs may easily monitor the essential DevOps metrics and have a clear view of their team's progress and project development. Our solution collects and analyzes data and insights from your engineering stack to help you optimize your development process.