Swarmia

Missed our LinkedIn Live on rethinking developer productivity? Catch Swarmia CEO Otto Hilska and Field CTO Rebecca Murphey discuss everything from: 🔹 Communicating engineering priorities to non-technical stakeholders 🔹 How the engineering talent market has changed over the past few years 🔹 How intuitive solutions — like increasing engineering utilization — may actually have an adverse effect on productivity 🔹 … and much more Watch the full recording on YouTube.

New in Swarmia: Questions & comments tab in developer experience surveys You can now: 🔹 Filter survey results by team 🔹 View rating distributions 🔹 See comments linked to each question 🔹 Sort by scores or the number of comments Read more in the changelog.

There’s increasing demand — from both senior engineering leaders and non-technical executives — for some objective measurement of software engineering processes. 🔹 But how do you choose which metrics to track? 🔹 What are the pitfalls you should avoid? 🔹 And how should you go about using those metrics? Read this post to find out.

Join us on LinkedIn Live as Otto and Rebecca discuss how “developer productivity” has become more urgent in the post-ZIRP era. We'll share what we're hearing in conversations with engineering leaders across the industry — stories of limited headcount and ever-higher business expectations — and discuss how to tackle these challenges without alienating developers.

Improving the quality of your daily stand-ups might only require one change: focus on the work, not the people. Instead of having team members take turns to share what they’re up to, you should “walk the board,” i.e. discuss important work items in the order of priority. Here’s how.

What does it take to build an effective engineering team? For tech companies, this is the (multi) million-dollar question. To find out, our partner Irena Goldenberg hosted a seminar with Otto Hilska, founder of engineering effectiveness platform Swarmia, and the company’s field CTO Rebecca Murphey to help our portfolio dive deep into this topic. Here are some of the things we learned: 💬 Engineering investments are a huge cost to businesses: Tracking ROI may be essential for the C-Suite but an over-emphasis on metrics can be harmful and stifle innovation What’s more impactful and delivers benefits in the longer-term, is to: ➡️ Understand team dynamics: Go beyond productivity metrics, by assessing how effectively teams collaborate, how efficiently work flows and dig deep to make informed decisions ➡️ Measure developer productivity, not just by numbers: Productivity is multi-dimensional. If teams are working at full capacity, the ability to respond to changes and problems will be limited ➡️ Choose the right metrics framework for your team: Adopt Agile, Scrum, maturity models like Kanban, or DORA DevOps metrics based on what aligns with your company's unique needs and goals   ➡️ Address external inefficiencies: Investigate interruptions caused by executive decisions or shifting priorities as these factors can derail progress and hinder the completion of tasks ➡️ The number one way to improve productivity? Break large tasks into manageable chunks. Use metrics such as overflowing sprints to identify areas for improvement and optimise efficiency How do you manage engineering effectiveness? Let us know in the comments! #engineeringefficency #developerproductivity

Developer experience surveys aren’t the only way to collect qualitative insights from your engineers. In this blog post, we introduce User Experience Objectives (UXOs) as a solution for capturing real-time data about developer experience.

Writing huge pull requests is a lot easier than splitting the work into smaller chunks. Yet, there are many reasons why you should aim for smaller PRs. Small PRs: 1. Get faster code reviews 2. Get more thorough code reviews 3. Improve code quality 4. Help protect your flow 5. Help you build features faster 6. Make it easier to hand over work that’s already been started 7. Improve collaboration 8. Reduce risk That’s why you’ll want to talk openly about PR size in your team and agree to aim for bite-size chunks of work in the future. Here’s how to do that in practice.

“What I really like about Swarmia is that everyone in the product engineering organization uses it in different ways. They all get value out of it, but that value changes based on their role,” says Silvia Di Nardo, Senior Engineering Manager at TrueLayer. In just three months, 81% of the TrueLayer engineering organization were actively using Swarmia in their daily work. 🔹 The engineering leadership team uses it to balance engineering investments and empower teams. 🔹 The engineering managers use it to eliminate blockers from their teams. 🔹 The engineers use it to collaborate on pull requests and automate feedback loops. Read more in the case study.

Introducing a developer productivity program looks a little bit different for every company, depending on their size, age, and culture. Still, we identified six relatively standard steps every organization will want to go through in the early days of their effectiveness journey.