Modern software development services focus on improving processes by introducing operational metrics and strengthening qualitative parameters. To build a high-quality software product, you need the right set of KPIs that apply accurate analytics to measure efficiency and performance at every stage.

Let’s see 7 such KPIs preferred by software developers.

Software Development KPI in Brief

Short for Key Performance Indicators, KPIs indicate standard values against which your business’s overall performance is measured. KPIs in an enterprise software development environment represent how well your business objectives guide the software development processes in a project. To this end, businesses must choose the most suitable software development KPI metrics, keeping business scalability in mind.

Types of Software Development KPIs

Formal Code Metrics

Metrics like Instruction Path Length (IPL), Lines of Code (LOC), code complexity, etc., represent code quality and help ensure consistency across developers. Formal code metrics today are not very relevant, as writing code doesn’t always contribute to better team performance or product quality.

Software Developer Productivity Metrics

These metrics (like velocity, cycle, and lead time) track each developer’s total input based on their investment of time and effort toward project development.

Test Metrics

Test quality and comprehensiveness directly influence product quality. Test metrics like automated test percentage, code coverage, and production defects can help ensure efficient testing of final products.

Operational Metrics

Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) and Mean Time to Recover (MTTR) are the common operational metrics that analyze your software’s performance in production and maintenance efficiency.

Customer Satisfaction

Customer satisfaction metrics like the Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), Net Promoter Score (NPS), and Customer Effort Score (CES) can check the quality of consumer interactions with the software and the satisfaction level.

Benefits of Software Development KPI Metrics

A software development company can help you put software metrics in place and significantly benefit your project management in different ways:

• Put processes, environments, and resources in defined categories to streamline software product development.
• Understand and predict future development in the relationships between products and processes.
• Timely detect roadblocks, inefficiencies, and potential issues to enable you to improve processes by finding solutions to resolve these problems.

As a client, you can set reasonable KPIs for developers. You can also leverage your well-measured and -monitored management capabilities across processes and projects to define your business language. As a result, you reduce overtime and project costs, improve ROI, optimize management of workloads, and discover areas of improvement.

Most Useful KPIs for Software Engineers to Measure Performance and More

Velocity

Speed is of significance when employees want to complete tasks within the agreed timeline. Story Points can help you measure the amount of work done for the effort invested in software creation. Story scores can give you an accurate estimate of the resources required to complete the project successfully.

For any project, three sprints are enough to understand the time your team will need to complete it. Using speed as a metric, you can adequately assess your entire team’s capability to achieve the goals.

Sprint Burndown

Sprint burning is the way to determine KPIs for the software development team by measuring the number of tasks done during each sprint. However, a set of main coefficients determine the overall score. To this end, sprint burning involves using special charts representing a summarized view of information. It is done by measuring time resources and understanding them in comparison with scores.

The insights obtained can guide you to restructure your work processes to flow at a greater speed.

Release Burndown

When it comes to the progress of a digital software release, the release burndown metric enables the team to manage the progress adequately. It helps track if the team is meeting the established timeframe and are doing its job within the defined period.

Top software development outsourcing companies that develop key performance indicators leverage publication generation diagrams to understand the team’s current state. This means how delayed the team is from their scheduled time or how far ahead and if the schedule is being monitored.

Cycle Time

This KPI metric demonstrates the effectiveness of the software development work. It evaluates the performance of the entire time through an objective assessment. It sees if the work is performed at the proper level and at an accurate pace.

For example, the metric can help eliminate any inconsistencies and further help revise the performance duties according to the set workflow objectives.

Cumulative flow

Program tasks and requests can be represented on a visual chart in a cumulative flow metric. This involves stages of work marked in different colors. These can be the following stages in the process of task completion: “Acknowledged,” “Task in progress,” “Adjustment,” “Project approved,” and so on.

Regardless of schemes and KPIs, they all work per the predefined scheme to ensure that the workflow suits the client and enables the team to perform step-by-step tasks.

Flow efficiency

This metric defines the time duration in software development and the time invested in general. This is an important aspect of any production process as a high per-hour rate of goods produced increases your market sale. Likewise, the more you achieve in an enterprise software development project, the faster you can launch the final product on the market.

Failure to complete a job means zero progress, prolonged waiting periods, and unmet goals. The metric can identify any deviations from the established plan or process, ensuring that each task is executed properly.

Code Coverage

Code is a decisive and fundamental aspect of creating a software application, and the metric shows how efficiently the code is done. Code Coverage is indispensable to the entire lifecycle of a digital product, from creation and testing to delivery and upgrades.

This KPI helps in error detection, shows debugging needs, and covers 100% of the code, leading to writing the code qualitatively in the first go.

Conclusion

Employing key performance indicators at every stage of software development helps detect errors early on and optimize all tasks for product success. Choosing KPIs that make the most sense for your unique enterprise software development project extends an excellent foundation for confident and accurate planning as well as problem-solving at every development step.

VLink is one of the top software development companies for end-to-end custom software development solutions that meet each client’s exact needs. In every project, we strategically plan to achieve the set targets at every stage of development, thanks to our exemplary custom software development process. Schedule your one-on-one consultation with us to understand how our development expertise can help you create your next high-performing software.