When it comes to software engineering, metrics are essential because they help team leaders understand the team’s efficiency in producing code. Traditionally, agile software engineering teams focus on subjective measures (based on personal interpretation) such as velocity, the lifecycle of stories, and defects. However, a tool like Flow allows engineering team leaders to boost engineering speed using objective (factual) measures to analyze everyday activities across teams.
Here’s how using flow metrics accelerates the software delivery process.
What is Flow
Flow is a cloud-based platform that stores and tracks data from software engineering teams. It uses an algorithm to validate their efficiency and productivity based on the code’s complexity, how frequently it’s produced, and the pace of reviewing code requests. Flow updates data autonomously, so the metrics are always up to date, providing insight into the team’s everyday life. Read more about Key Metrics for Scrum Leaders.
Why Use Flow
Using a tool like Flow allows team management to surface issues during the preliminary stages of the software development process, ensuring that they are addressed quickly to architect actionable solutions. Since every organization has a different scale for story points, not using a tool like Flow makes it extremely difficult for engineering team leaders to track efficiency.
Flow standardizes the development process, making it easier to identify and communicate the software team’s accomplishments to the client. Additionally, tracking the productivity of remote teams can be challenging. Flow metrics allow upper management to visualize areas where engineers struggle and provide extra support.
The benefits of using the Flow platform include the following:
- Identify issues early in the software engineering process and develop solutions.
- Standardization of the metric across the team and organizations.
- Recognize areas for team improvement and weak points that need extra support.
- Identify individual efficiency and overall team efficiency in one central location with standardized measurements.
Using Flow to Enhance the Software Engineering Process
For leadership to get the most value from their flow metrics, it’s important to visualize data in a digestible format. Within the Flow platform, there is a central location to visualize current data in addition to previous trends and patterns. Historical data allows software engineers to make informed decisions to optimize their development process.
Often, management overlooks multiple teams within a given period. Using Flow, leaders can view the metrics for each holistic team and individual.
The main reasons why team leaders use Flow to accelerate the software development process are:
- Visualize data in a central location.
- Access historical data with patterns and trends to optimize the development process.
- Discover both individual efficiencies as well as team efficiency across multiple teams seamlessly.
Flow is a powerful tool that can be used to improve software engineering. It helps team leaders identify ineffective activities, existing processes bottlenecks, and areas that need more training or education. By using flow metrics, management can make the software engineering processes more efficient and save time in the development cycle.
