Pluralsight Flow

Pluralsight Flow is a software engineering intelligence tool that gives you everything to help your team build a more efficient workflow. Flow uses data driven engineering analytics to create an insightful foundation to help position your team for collaboration and growth. To learn more about Flow visit us at https://lnkd.in/gJZnGwct #SoftwareEngineeringIntelligence #EngineeringLeadership #EngineeringManagement #SoftwareEngineering

A great developer experience isn’t just about the tools or processes—it’s about creating an environment where your team feels supported, valued, and empowered to do their best work. Here’s how you can help your developers thrive: 🔹 Onboarding with Purpose: Communication starts from day one. Give your developers everything they need to hit the ground running—tools, access, training—so they feel confident and ready to contribute right away. 🔹 Creating a Safe Space for Code: Build a culture of trust with strong code reviews and clear guidelines. When problems are tackled without blame, you give developers the freedom to experiment and improve. It’s about growing together, not pointing fingers. 🔹 Frequent Feedback Loops: Feedback is growth. It’s the chance for your team to learn, adapt, and excel. DORA-style sprints make room for quick wins, early fixes, and more collaboration. Small steps lead to big leaps. 🔹 Space for Creativity: Developers are problem-solvers at heart. Give them the space to innovate, collaborate, and build outside of the daily grind. Hackathons, side projects, and automating tedious tasks inspire creativity and keep the team energized. When you invest in your developers’ experience, you’re not just improving processes—you’re nurturing a team that’s motivated, resilient, and ready to create amazing things.

Software capitalization rules are straightforward, but knowing when to use them can make a big impact on your engineering team. Capitalize software when it's part of a strategic initiative, involves significant innovation, or promises long-term benefits—like cost reductions or new revenue streams. Plus, it can boost morale by showing your commitment to the team’s growth. Avoid capitalization if the project is short-term, too risky, or focused on routine maintenance. The key is aligning capitalization with projects that serve long-term goals, not just short-term financial gains. Learn more in our blog—link in comments 🌟

With so many metrics to track, it’s easy to get lost in the numbers. But when it comes to making meaningful progress, it’s crucial to align your metrics with your organizational goals. The Goal/Question/Metric (GQM) method is a simple framework to do just that. Whether you’re aiming to improve technical quality, team health, or product delivery, this method keeps your metrics focused and aligned with your larger vision. Want to start aligning your metrics with your goals? See the full GQM method in our blog post—link in the comments. 🎯

From an operational perspective, DevOps metrics provide data-driven insights that help you continuously improve and deliver better software and more value to your customers. Isn’t that just music to your executive team’s ears? The real power of DevOps? Helping your teams focus on the customer experience and simplifying the goals of each release so you can move faster than your competitors. Check out the full breakdown on additional DevOps metrics to track in our blog post—link in comments.🚀

🚨 R&D Tax Change Alert 🚨 Prior to 2022, companies could immediately deduct full R&D costs on their tax returns. However, the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) changed that. Starting January 1, 2022, companies must capitalize and amortize R&D costs—including software development—over five years for U.S.-incurred expenses and 15 years for international costs. This means instead of immediately deducting R&D expenses, businesses now spread them out over time, which could create challenges for teams in loss situations. The Tax Relief for American Families and Workers Act (introduced in 2024) could offer a retroactive solution by allowing businesses to fully expense R&D costs until 2025—if it passes. Get the full breakdown of how these changes impact your finances in our latest blog. Link in comments.

Not all metrics are the same Jira covers the basics—like tracking Agile progress—but it won’t tell you if your team’s stuck in a loop of inefficiency or quietly burning out. That’s where measurement tools come in, offering deep dives into historical trends, team health, and collaboration to help identify bottlenecks and build smarter processes. At the core, metrics should show how well your team is hitting goals and developing productive code. Metrics typically fall into a few distinct buckets, each mapping to a key aspect of the software development lifecycle. Here's the breakdown? 📎 Read more on our blog—link in the comments!

As we enter 2025, it’s clear we’ve reached an inflection point for Agile and DevOps. What began as simple, transformative ideas—focused on collaboration, quality, and shared ownership—has grown into something almost unrecognizable. SAFe diagrams that could rival a Jackson Pollock painting. A never-ending list of “Ops” disciplines. And metrics that often feel more like performance trackers than tools for improvement. But it doesn’t have to stay this way. The Agile Manifesto was 68 words long. DORA metrics succeeded because they’re simple, transparent, and safe. These ideas worked not because of their complexity but because they empowered teams and helped them feel their progress. 2025 is the year to refocus. It’s time to strip away unnecessary complexity and get back to basics: 💻 Collaboration over frameworks. 💻 Transparency over buzzwords. 💻 Incremental improvement over bureaucracy. Here’s the thing: you already know where to start. Choose one process, one metric, one area to improve. Keep it simple and meaningful. Focus on what truly makes the work better for your team. Let’s make 2025 the year we stop chasing labels and start leading with empathy and clarity. Thoughts from Mike Hoye, Developer Relations Director

By now, you’ve probably seen the '~9.5% of software engineers do virtually nothing: Ghost Engineers' paper making the rounds. It claims nearly a tenth of engineers contribute nothing and should be fired. Big claim. Bigger miss. Software engineering is collaborative—it’s about solving tough problems as a team. Punitive measures based on narrow metrics do more harm than good, eroding psychological safety and increasing burnout. Metrics are valuable (it’s kinda our gig). But the right metrics empower teams, foster collaboration, and prioritize long-term success over short-term blame. Curious about how to measure team efficiency while keeping team health front and center? Check out our blog—link in the comments.

How do you measure the true impact of the changes you’re making in your engineering organization? Whether it’s testing a new tool, rolling out a process, or adopting Copilot, knowing what’s working (and what isn’t) can be tough. In Flow Like A Pro, we unpack engineering challenges like this and explore how Flow’s tools can help you make sense of the data. In this first episode, join David F., Head of Product at Flow, to see Scenario Builder in action. It’s a simple way to track the before, during, and after of key decisions—so you can tell the full story of your team’s evolution. Let’s rethink how we measure success. ✨💻