Healthy software metrics: How successful software teams measure their work

Author: Carol Lee, PhD, Morgan Ramsey, & Cat Hicks, PhD | Read time: ~ 17 mins 

In the first whitepaper in this series, we discussed the dilemma facing engineering leaders today: Increased scrutiny of engineering productivity, as well as increased pressure to retain the best talent by improving the developer experience. We proposed the Developer Thriving framework (in our first whitepaper) and the two kinds of visibility (in our second) as a way to improve both engineering performance and the developer experience.

But there’s something we haven’t addressed yet. Engineering leaders are facing pressure from board leadership to quantify engineering performance. This has led companies like Twitter and Salesforce to rely on severely flawed metrics such as lines of code written.