What is engineering efficiency? + How to improve your team's outcomes

Is your team suffering from inconsistent delivery, software with high defect rates, or constant resource allocation issues? By streamlining your team's workflow and focusing on intelligent planning, you can deliver high-quality software on time, every time. Your team can optimize its software development planning, production, and delivery by focusing on the concepts of engineering efficiency.

Improving your team's engineering efficiency requires buy-in from leadership to help guide process improvements. We'll explore the details of engineering efficiency, along with its overall benefits and affecting factors. Then, we'll look at how to measure engineering efficiency and tips on improving your process.

Table of contents

• What is engineering efficiency?
• Benefits of engineering efficiency
• 4 factors that impact engineering efficiency
• Measuring engineering efficiency metrics and KPIs
• 12 tools to improve engineering efficiency
• FAQ

Engineering efficiency isn't about a single developer—it's about your entire team and how they work together to deliver high-quality results. A team's engineering efficiency depends on its leadership coordinating time and resources, driving a team to create software that meets user needs and addresses pain points.

Focusing your team on user needs is essential. An effective process that produces results people don't want is almost as bad as a poor process that gives desired results. Team leaders should emphasize engineering efficiency within their development process. Using the best code quality tools, your team can achieve its goals more effectively.

Leaders who champion more streamlined processes can also reduce developer frustration, helping to boost overall team morale and productivity. As a leader, you guide and coordinate your team to success through practical approaches and techniques.

You may hear engineering efficiency and developer productivity used interchangeably in discussions, but they’re fundamentally different concepts. 

While developer productivity focuses on the efficiency of an individual team member, engineering efficiency is a view of the overall team. Developer productivity generally examines the speed and efficiency of code production, while engineering efficiency takes a broader approach from ideation to deployment.

You wouldn't spend time on engineering efficiency if it didn't benefit your team. Focusing on efficiency isn't merely a way for a team to appear more organized; it's a methodology to create higher-quality software with more remarkable results. Engineering efficiency is an ongoing process that allows your team to continuously improve and deliver increased value to the user and your organization. 

Here are some of the top benefits of engineering efficiency:

• Decreased operational costs: A key component of engineering efficiency is reducing waste and improving resource allocation. This process helps lower operational costs for IT budgeting, reduce development time, and get your software to market faster. Reduced downtime from high-quality software can also have a sizable impact on costs.
• Enhanced developer experience: Streamlining your workflow can reduce friction and allow developers to focus on their primary coding objective, worrying less about tedious work and the need to switch focus constantly. Effective communication channels can also lead to better overall collaboration, reducing frustration.
• Improved user experience: By streamlining development, your team can deliver features and improvements to users faster and more reliably. This increased efficiency empowers developers to focus on creating valuable customer experiences rather than being bogged down by unnecessary tasks. Ultimately, this leads to a better user experience and increased customer satisfaction.
• Increased team productivity: By setting clear goals and priorities, your team can more effectively work toward universal objectives, reducing wasted time. Time is a valued resource, so you can utilize this gain for higher-priority workloads, focusing on what's most important.
• More time for innovation: More time available equals more time to innovate. By automating repetitive tasks and creating faster development cycles, your team can spend its time researching new approaches and features. This also falls on engineering leaders to foster a culture of experimentation and create an innovative team.

Four factors can significantly impact your engineering efficiency approach and help deliver positive outcomes: your team's workflow optimization, available technology, skill sets, and strategies to deal with external elements. Clearly communicating with your team can positively affect each of these areas, leading to even greater efficiency.

Improving your team's software development workflow is one of the finest ways to create a more efficient software engineering practice. An inefficient workflow can lead to lengthy bottlenecks and wasted resources, resulting in confusion and developmental delays for your team.

Standardize practices to create a consistent development flow with predictable tasks. Adopt Agile methodologies like Scrum or SAFe that promote iterative development and continuous feedback, and use project management and communication tools to stay on the same page and facilitate information flow within your team.

The technology and tools available to your team can impact your overall efficiency. Using proper tools, your team can automate tedious or repetitive tasks without dedicating finite time and resources. Tools such as Pluralsight Flow can keep track of software engineering metrics, allowing your team to better understand its overall efficiency and developer productivity through methods like the SPACE framework.

Communication is vital to efficiency, so begin by talking to your developers to learn their pain points. For example, providing more modern development environments with code completion and automated testing can help streamline your development process and reduce developer frustration. Invest in your team by obtaining modern development tools and understanding common developer insight myths.

Having the proper skills within your team is essential for an efficient engineering process. Lacking the appropriate skills can also lead to decreased morale and, thus, reduced productivity.

Invest in ongoing training and development for your existing team members, covering any skill gaps they may have. Create a positive environment for your team where individuals aren't afraid to step up and admit they need to learn something new or improve their skills. For example, you can encourage asking questions within daily standups or regularly scheduling time for skill development.

Not all factors impacting a team's engineering efficiency come from within. Your team will also deal with external factors affecting its development, such as dependencies or evolving requirements due to market shifts. By preparing strategies, your team can be ready for such scenarios and reduce severe drops in efficiency.

Begin by acknowledging any dependencies you may have on other teams and optimizing communication to help minimize potential delays. You can also help reduce complexity by breaking down larger tasks into small ones. Always be aware of possible risks and create strategies that minimize the potential impact if they occur.

Engineering efficiency metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) can help you better understand the overall efficiency of your development process. Before making a change within your team or organization, you first need to establish where you are right now. This way, you can better understand how your changes affect the development process.

Tracking software development KPIs is an excellent way to ensure your developers' results align with business goals; it can also tell you an efficiency story. Using a product like Pluralsight Flow, you can observe these metrics, painting a better picture of your current efficiency and how it changes over time. Interpreting and reacting to these metrics is the key to success and ongoing growth for your team.

Here are some engineering metrics to consider:

• Bug rate: How often your team finds bugs during testing
• Code coverage: The percentage of source code properly reviewed by testing processes, like code review checklists
• Cycle time: How long it takes your team to complete a specific task, such as a single code cycle
• Deployment frequency: How often your development team deploys code for staging, testing, or production
• Engineering satisfaction: The overall happiness and motivation of your team members, which you can boost via the Developer Thriving framework
• Lead time for changes: The time it takes for committed code to enter production.
• On-time completion rate: The percent of projects or tasks completed by planned deadlines
• Planned vs. actual cost: The difference between the estimated cost of a project and the actual cost
• Resource utilization: The efficiency with which a resource is utilized, such as people, hardware, or finances
• Velocity: The amount of work your team completes during a development sprint

You know that engineering efficiency is critical to your team's output, but where should you start? Based on experience and research, we've assembled 12 tips to help guide you and your team on your quest for greater efficiency:

1. Break down siloed teams: Destroy communication gaps by fostering collaboration via shared goals, frequent communication, and rotating team roles.
2. Choose the right tools: Select modern tools like Pluralsight Flow to help you streamline your workflow and automate tasks.
3. Document everything: Eliminate confusion and wasted time by ensuring your team adequately documents their code and processes within a knowledge base.
4. Embrace automation: Focus on essential tasks by delegating repetitive, time-consuming tasks to automation platforms.
5. Embrace experimentation: Celebrate success and learn from losses to encourage a culture of experimentation in which fear of failure isn't a factor.
6. Establish clear communication: Create better communication within set channels, encourage ongoing feedback, and use project management tools to stay on track as a team.
7. Make processes self-reinforcing: Build a feedback loop and promote ownership of tasks to keep your team accountable.
8. Prevent developer burnout: Avoid overwork and stress by promoting work-life balance. Set realistic expectations, encourage breaks, and promote healthy boundaries.
9. Provide ongoing training: Tackle skill gaps that can harm productivity by offering training programs, encouraging knowledge sharing, and supporting your team's certifications.
10. Set clear goals and expectations: Ensure that your team has established well-defined project goals and that each member understands their specific tasks and responsibilities.
11. Standardize procedures: Create standards to reduce room for confusion and duplicated effort. Use templates to get started and allow quick access to your processes.
12. Streamline workflows: Reduce complex workflows by breaking them down into small tasks, optimizing handoff points, and eliminating unnecessary steps.

If you still have questions about engineering efficiency, we're happy to answer them. We have decades of experience helping development teams achieve their goals.

Engineering effectiveness goes beyond typical engineering efficiency to ensure that produced output properly aligns with organizational goals to deliver maximum user value. It places a heavy focus on whether the product you’re building is the "right" thing for your customers.

Due to the complex nature of software development and natural limitations, your team will never hit the triple-digit mark—and that's okay! Focus on improvements, learning from mistakes, and adapting to a constantly changing landscape rather than your productivity number alone. Focusing too hard on 100% efficiency can quickly lead to diminishing results.

With engineering efficiency, it's critical to understand where your team currently stands and whether the changes you’re implementing are having an effect. Through insights, including DevOps metrics, collected from solutions like Pluralsight Flow, developers can better picture their overall positioning and current direction. 

Transform your team's engineering efficiency with Flow—request a demo today.