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With 2023 knocking on our doors, there’s no escaping the fully remote or hybrid workforce. Companies have now adapted to, perfected, and thrived in keeping their teams remote. Remote teams can be 35% more productive than in-person teams. New research from Ladders shows that companies in varied industries, from tech to media and health care, are currently hiring for fully remote jobs with up to six-figure salaries.
With the current shift in tech caused by recent layoffs, some of the most talented developers are looking for new opportunities. But how can a company keep its team on track without an office to impose productivity? The job market is way past the notion that an office is a requirement for efficiency. But the key to a successful team is concise goal setting. With the proper metrics and tracking, remote teams can get in the groove of things and meet all quotas, and we’re here to share with you the best ones. Keep reading to learn all about the top software development KPIs for remote teams!
Software development KPIs help you seamlessly measure your remote software developers’ efficiency
Before we dive in, let’s define what a successful software development metric looks like. KPI metrics must be simple, measurable, achievable, and easily visible. Most importantly, they should align with your company’s goals and mission. Well-defined metrics provide a laser-focused and indisputable overview of your team’s performance and improvements. KPIs help you acknowledge successes and reward a job well done. If your team is overperforming and constantly crushing the set metrics, it might be time to increase your goals and celebrate!
At Blue Coding, we are no strangers to the power of remote teams. Our mission is to connect the best Latin American software developers with companies across North America. We understand that managing talent is just as important as finding it. To help you manage and guarantee your remote team’s success, here are Blue Coding’s top KPIs for software development.
Top software development KPIs for remote teams
Velocity.
Velocity is one of the best internal software development KPIs to measure your team’s success and improvements. This metric will define your team’s productivity by tracking how long it takes for your software development team to complete a sprint. With tracked data, you can use velocity to accurately estimate how long it will take your team to finish a new project.
Velocity as a metric provides some flexibility in tracking, as it’s an average of several metrics. You can choose from various goals, such as the number of tasks completed or the days it took for the sprint to be completed. When setting a velocity goal, avoid comparing one team with the other. This metric should be unique and specific to each team and serve only as an internal indicator of productivity.
Sprint Burnout
Paired with velocity, sprint burnout gives you the full picture of your team’s productivity. This software development KPI will give your team a full-picture view of the work that has been completed and still needs to be taken care of. While velocity can be tracked by considering several variables, sprint burnout narrows down productivity.
As a KPI for software development, sprint burnout is highly effective in visually illustrating the rate of efficiency. For example, while velocity rates might be down due to a bigger project being currently worked on, sprint burnout rates will show rates of completion considering the tasks at hand.
Release Burnout
While velocity and sprint burnout are great internal KPIs for software development, release burnout is helpful when managing customer satisfaction. It can become difficult to accurately represent your remote team’s progress to a client or stakeholders when most of the completed tasks aren’t visible progress.
By tracking release burnout, you can give the team and any stakeholders a clear view of a project’s schedule. This metric will track if a project is on time, ahead of schedule, or off track. It’s important to track release burnout since it’s specific to a project. Your velocity and sprint burnout may be high while a project’s release burnout is falling off track.
Cycle Time
Cycle time is another one of the software development KPIs that zero in on individual productivity. This metric will help you define how long a task moves from “to-do” to “completed.” Cycle time will heavily depend on the statuses your team guides tasks through. Defining those statuses first is imperative to then track accurate cycle times. Every developer on your team must follow the same pipeline steps to accurately use cycle time to predict a project’s timeline. This software development KPI is very helpful to development teams who use Agile methodologies.
Code Stability and Simplicity
Code stability and simplicity are two stand-alone metrics that together can quantify your team’s success. It measures the efficiency of the original code when presented with minor changes. Can the project sustain changes without breaking major channels and functions?
Code simplicity works similarly, tracking how easily the code can be changed and adjusted. Both of these metrics aim at improving how easily tested and improved a project can be. Ultimately code stability measures how efficient your code is while code simplicity measures how easily it can be improved.
Mean time to repair (MTTR)
MTTR is one of the most essential KPIs for software development. This metric will track how long it takes your team to solve issues from discovery to completion. MTTR as a software development metric should decrease over time. As your team becomes more experienced, fewer issues should arise and solutions should already exist for expected bugs.
Bug Rates or Defect Metrics
Tracking bug rates or defect metrics can avoid many headaches. Simply by running daily tests on production, you can flag bugs present in production and work on churning solutions instead of focusing on finding issues. These bug-related software development KPIs can be tracked both during the coding process and in the production of the web or mobile apps.
Ready to build an outsourced team of remote developers?
Of course, software development KPIs alone aren’t enough to guarantee a team’s success. First, you need to have an efficient team of developers that can abide by these metrics and use them to their advantage. At Blue Coding, we not only provide you with various resources to help you best manage, onboard, optimize, and effectively communicate with your remote team but also have a large international network of nearshore developers ready to deploy. We can help you start outsourcing to Latin America today. Contact us to learn more about our services!
