Delivery excellence is a cultural framework that refers to continuously improving your processes to deliver the best value to customers. Delivery Excellence derives from the Lean enterprise, and it’s a customer-focused approach to managing software development projects. A customer-centric approach means that all the business goals and processes are aligned with focusing on delivering quality products and services to the end customer. Applying this principle will result in optimal customer satisfaction and loyalty and reduced operational and marketing costs.
When used in software development, Delivery Excellence will scale your organization by optimizing the deployment process and increasing communication between departments to serve the main goal – understanding and prioritizing customer needs. This process also involves continuously improving the processes through automation, constant assessments, and reducing resource waste as much as possible. To understand where you stand regarding process improvement and where adjustments must be made, you can use specific software delivery metrics that will help you scale your business and make data-driven decisions to improve your software project management processes.
Waydev’s reports and dashboards provide crucial insight into the deployment process, the quality and velocity of written code, and how many resources are wasted on bottlenecks and issues. Our all-in-one DORA Metrics dashboard can give you a better overview of your deployment process and where bottlenecks appear.
Tracking software delivery excellence is critical to understanding your efficiency in delivering quality products and services as fast as possible. By assessing the efficiency and productivity of your engineering teams, you can optimize project management, reduce resource waste, and maximize your profits. To achieve all this, you need to track specific software delivery metrics. They will help you get a holistic view of how you manage software projects, where bottlenecks appear, and what areas need improvement.
Here is a breakdown of the main benefits that excellence metrics can bring to your organization:
Excellence metrics are essential because they give you a holistic view of how your projects are going regarding management and execution. Isolated metrics that only track your processes partially can’t give you the whole picture needed to understand your projects. These could be organized in development value streams, for example, and metrics can show you each step of the way, from initial research and requirements gathering to delivery process and maintenance. Putting these metrics in context shows you how the stages and practices are aligned with each other – this could reveal if there’s a better way of doing it.
Tracking excellence metrics will encourage continuous improvement by giving you concrete data to compare over time. Doing so will reveal whether your processes are improving or falling short in some areas, giving you plenty of time to make adjustments based on solid data instead of guesswork. When using excellence metrics to track continuous improvement, this technique focused on the process rather than the outcome. There are many factors that can influence this and make the process more successful or faulty, such as the project management approach, the delegation of tasks, the size of the workpieces (whether they are manageable or realistic), the dependencies, and handoff practices.
Excellence metrics cover all aspects of the software delivery process, starting with code reliability and velocity, user satisfaction, and the business value provided by your software products or services. All of these cover a broad spectrum of the deployment process and give you a better grip on aligning it with the business values and goals. Tracking so many areas at the same time helps you identify bottlenecks and points where adjustments are needed to smooth out the process and maximize success.
Not all tech organizations, departments, or engineering teams are built the same. Rather they all have different needs to function optimally and different business goals. You can customize excellence metrics in order to track your deployment processes and make better data-driven decisions focusing on specific areas relevant to your teams and objectives.
When thinking about the processes involved in completing software projects, there are many different areas that make or break your success. Sometimes it can be challenging to understand what to focus on and how to pinpoint problem areas that slow down or negatively impact delivering value to customers. Excellence metrics give you the opportunity to gain a holistic view of the deployment process starting from the requirements gathering stage, the testing and deployment process, up to maintenance of the released apps.
Tracking all of these aspects involves looking at areas such as engineering teams’ performance in terms of code quality and velocity, downtime that shows code stability, client satisfaction, and how these relate to your business goals.
Here is a list of the main metrics used to track delivery excellence:
Code coverage is a quantitative metric that shows how many lines of code are validated in the testing phase that runs on the source code. Using this metric will help engineers improve their code writing by exposing problematic code, achieve easier maintenance of their code base, and get faster time to market for your software products.
Code complexity is a metric used to predict defect probability. The benefits of measuring code complexity range from reducing wasted resources in fixing issues and bugs and reducing maintenance costs to increasing the overall efficiency in managing the current software project.
Code maintainability refers to having a series of consistent practices that ensure the code is easy to maintain and fix or change over time. Achieving this required wider coordination at the organizational level and good collaborations across teams.
You can optimize the success of your software projects by keeping track of your software delivery metrics. This will help you identify what works and what doesn’t in your current practices and areas that need improvement. Here are some optimal tools and best practices for measuring and understanding software metrics, as well as some common pitfalls that can mislead you when interpreting these metrics:
There are a number of software tools that you can use for measuring software delivery metrics. Here is a list of some of the most widely used tools and how you can use them to your advantage:
GitLab is a DevSecOps platform, meaning it provides a workflow framework that allows development, security, and operational teams to work together in a more collaborative and transparent way instead of in siloes. This is an open-source code repository team that helps DevOps teams to write code throughout the entire development lifecycle and create the codebase. GitLab has many useful features, such as continuous integration (CI), that enables automating code building and testing, making these processes as easy as possible for development teams. Using it improves code quality and provides the opportunity for faster time-to-market.
Waydev offers you great insight into engineering activity and your codebase with our GitLab integration feature. This integration provides many essential metrics, such as review workflow or reviews collaboration for your code review, or comprehensive reports, such as developer summary or work log.
2. CircleCI
CircleCI is a continuous integration platform that helps DevOps teams automate processes such as building, testing, and deploying code. By using smart features such as complex dashboards and workflow tracking, this continuous integration tool provides a faster and more secure way to build and monitor CI/CD pipelines.
3. Jira
Jira is a project management tool that helps you organize your teams’ workflow and track issues along the product’s lifecycle. This tool comes with customizable dashboards that you can adapt to fit your team’s needs and the project’s specific requirements. Jira is a very flexible framework that can be integrated with many other platforms.
By using Waydev’s Jira integration feature, you can benefit from tracking your teams’ activity and visualize sprint risks to better predict your next project’s outcome. Using this integration provides transparency of tasks, faster output by using automation, and the ability to create intricate roadmaps, and it encourages team collaboration.
While software delivery metrics are essential to monitoring and optimizing your delivery processes and practices, it’s not easy to identify the right metrics and define them. Furthermore, interpreting them in the right context to suit your needs and work environment can prove even more challenging.
One of the most common pitfalls is using the so-called vanity metrics that only look good at the surface but fail to provide valuable insight. For example, from a business standpoint, how many people enter your website is no guarantee of anything, while how many buy your product/ pay a fee for using your app is another matter.
But choosing the right metrics is only the first step to optimizing your software delivery process; now, you must also analyze them properly. You can use a number of tried and tested techniques to ensure that you’re interpreting data properly, such as statistical analysis and comparing your data with industry averages and research. Other ways to draw the right conclusions when considering data is using data visualization, with charts, infographics, and other presentation features, for a clearer overall image.
While metrics are very important in any data-driven environment because they help executives and stakeholders make informed decisions, tracking them presents many challenges. While there is some common ground in software development, some concepts are not universally defined and accepted across the field, and metrics fall under this category. For this reason, having strict benchmarks and comparisons can prove to be difficult.
Other challenges in using software development metrics are:
You can address these challenges by setting clear objectives both at a macro level and for smaller batches of work and finding reliable tools that improve data consistency by using both qualitative and quantitative data. Waydev collects data in an automated way that doesn’t require any manual input throughout a product’s lifecycle, ensuring the reliability and accuracy of the information. Analyzing this data over time can give a good basis for understanding your teams’ strong suits and areas for improvement and give you the means to establish more tailored goals for the future.
Waydev also features both qualitative and quantitative software delivery metrics that provide valuable insight into your processes and practices. Combining these with statistics, industry averages, and feedback from stakeholders and customers will result in priceless information for decision-making in optimizing your software delivery process.
Here is a guideline of how to drive continuous improvement into your delivery process by using delivery excellence metrics:
In a competitive and fast-changing environment such as the tech industry, companies have to continuously improve their strategies, objectives, practices, and processes to keep up. To this effect, software delivery excellence should be a top priority for any tech leads that want to scale their business and take their company into the future. But in order to understand and improve any business aspect, you need to be able to identify and measure its capabilities, intricate aspects, and weaker points.
Software delivery metrics are the perfect means to getting valuable insight into your software practices and day-to-day processes that happen during a product’s lifecycle. A comprehensive view of your end-to-end software deployment will help you make informed decisions on where to improve and where to implement radical changes.
Complex platforms such as Waydev can provide comprehensive reports, roadmaps for future project strategies, and dashboards that give you a clear picture of where you stand in terms of performance, time-to-market, and overall providing the best value to customers. By getting this reliable data with no manual input, you’re gaining access to the basis of your future strategies and pivotal decisions that can scale your entire business.
Schedule a demo today and start the process of optimizing your software delivery process by measuring the right metrics.
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