A survey of 350 software developers found a majority (91%) of respondents are unhappy with the actual metrics leadership teams are measuring.
The survey, conducted by Atomik Research on behalf of Uplevel, an enterprise intelligence platform provider, found the top metrics developers say should be tracked include hours worked (52%), work allocation (49%) and the amount of time they have to focus on writing code (46%).
Unfortunately, the survey also revealed more than half of respondents (56%) reported that the CTOs that lead software development efforts make significant strategic decisions without realizing the negative impact on their team. They also often move people around on projects or tasks without knowing the full implications (51%) and overwork developers (44%).
Just under a third (30%) noted their engineering leaders rely solely on gut feelings to measure the effectiveness of their teams, while a third of respondents observed most engineering roadblocks go unnoticed by leadership.
Additionally, 96% noted that not knowing what their own leadership team is working on is detrimental to the larger team.
Christina Forney, vice president of product management for Uplevel, said many CTOs clearly need to be more engaged. Developers don’t mind being measured, but they clearly want to be evaluated based on metrics that matter, she added.
Managing software development teams has become a lot more challenging in an era where many developers are working remotely. IT leaders can no longer manage by walking around as easily as they once did, said Forney. Aligning workflows across a highly distributed team of developers is a challenge no matter how many communications platforms are used.
Surprisingly, the Uplevel survey found more than half of respondents (54%) said they feel more productive in the office. More than a third (35%) also said they preferred some form of synchronous communication to engage with other members of their team versus 27% that preferred some form of asynchronous communication. A total of 38% said they preferred a mix.
It’s no secret that despite long-standing commitments to automation, there are still a lot of manual processes in DevOps workflows that create bottlenecks. In an uncertain economy, however, there’s a lot more focus on developer productivity, so eliminating DevOps bottlenecks has become a major priority. The challenge is those bottlenecks are not as apparent to senior IT leaders, many of whom may have simply become inured to them over time.
Regardless of how bottlenecks occurred, DevOps teams would be well-advised to reevaluate the metrics they track. Mean-time-to-recovery (MTTR), for example, is not as important a metric to the business as the amount of quality code that finds its way into a production environment.
In theory, all the data required to track more meaningful metrics that could improve productivity already exists in the tools and platforms DevOps teams use to build and deploy an application. The challenge has been finding a way to automatically surface that data without adding yet another bottleneck to a DevOps workflow.
