Swarmia

Software engineering organizations go through many phases as they grow. One thing tends to be constant: what worked before won’t work forever. Join us on November 4 as we discuss the challenges of scaling software engineering at startups.

“Swarmia both feeds and empowers our insights. It allows our engineers to dive deeper into the metrics in a specialized environment, which would make no sense for us to build for ourselves,” says Walter de Bruijn, Head of Engineering Productivity at Miro. Find out how the whole engineering organization at Miro is using Swarmia to: 🔹 Access the exact insights they need to make better decisions 🔹 Make sure all strategic engineering initiatives are staffed appropriately 🔹 Streamline the process of reporting on commodity metrics like DORA and SPACE 🔹 Power external dashboards that combine data from multiple sources Read the whole story below.

New in Swarmia: Dive deeper into engineering metrics with related survey results Engineering metrics can help you find problems that are worth solving. But what they don’t often tell you is how to go about fixing the issue. That’s why Swarmia now connects survey results with related metrics, so you can not only spot issues but also start exploring solutions immediately. Read more in the changelog.

Thank you for the book Swarmia! You can read it online and their blog offers a good source of wisdom. Also I recommend looking into Google's project Aristotle ("Leading Effective Engineering Teams" by Addy Osmani is a great start). Darn, now there are no excuses to do it right I guess. :)

“If you just keep building new features and never address the baggage that you’re creating, you will get to a point where all delivery becomes unpredictable.” Check out the latest episode of the alphalist podcast, where our Field CTO Rebecca Murphey shares her thoughts on: 🔹 Balancing short-term and long-term priorities 🔹 How to allocate time for different engineering tasks 🔹 Team metrics vs. individual metrics 🔹 The ethical debate on tracking developer metrics … and more! Check out the full episode here or wherever you get your podcasts 👇

Get to know the five metrics that are so fundamental to engineering effectiveness that if your organization consistently lands on the “needs attention” range on any of them, you’ll immediately know where to invest. Check out the benchmarks here 👇

Now in public beta: Measure engineering effort with a new FTE-based model The new model measures effort in full-time equivalent (FTE) months. The benefit is that it considers hundreds of data points for each developer and accounts for different coding styles. Read more in the changelog.

Talking to your engineering team about difficult topics — like productivity — can be scary. But more often that not, such conversations pay off in the long run. That’s why in this blog post, we share concrete advice for having those difficult discussions.

No two engineering organizations are exactly the same. And that’s why there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to improving software development productivity. In this blog post, we discuss how the size, age, and culture of your organization should play into your productivity journey.

What’s the one thing your startup or scaleup doesn’t need? Hero culture: the all-too-common situation where one person becomes irreplaceable by being the only one with all the answers. In this episode of Engineering Unblocked, Andrea Corey, VP of Engineering at Homebase, shares lessons she’s learned about building scaleups more sustainably.