What are software development KPIs?
Key performance indicators (KPIs) are values that measure the overall performance of your business. In the context of software development, KPIs indicate how well your development efforts align with business goals.
Key performance indicators (KPIs) show how your development efforts align with business goals.
Choosing the right software metrics is the first step. You’d be surprised how often companies choose the wrong metrics to measure development team success. The use of KPIs such as lines of code, commits, and rollouts is not uncommon. But this is clearly misleading.
The above figures do not correspond to actual targets. And the KPIs you choose for software development require more nuance. Business leaders rarely know enough about the intricacies of software development to truly understand what a successful project is. For example, the traditional software metrics above work best for development teams that use the waterfall model for development.
However, modern software development teams choose to use agile software development to scale faster and better. Agile Processes focuses on rapid application development with continuous delivery and deployment.
With these goals in mind, it is clear that software KPIs should rely on business scalability as an essential component of performance metrics. And this particular quality has perhaps the greatest influence on the definition of a software development KPI. The question is not only what should the software development team accomplish, but also how to create business value?
Then you’ll learn more about the right metrics to use to match business preference and software quality.
Why are metrics important in software development?
Like in any other business, achieving goals means being intentional about how you accomplish them.
Likewise, setting KPIs and making sure your team is committed to accomplishing them ensures high-quality software. It’s also more likely that you’ll finish your project on time and within budget.
When an issue occurs, your metrics provide valuable context for identifying the problem. Metrics help your business track and monitor certain issues, and prioritize which metrics you think should stand out the most.
KPIs also encourage team productivity. When a development team can better recognize its collective efforts and how these efforts contribute to positive or negative results, it becomes more effective to resolve bottlenecks. Either way, having an organized method for measuring the progress of your software development process will help increase your return on investment (ROI).
software development KPI:
Now that you know about KPIs and their role in software development, you should see which KPIs are best suited for software development.