Evaluating the overall productivity of your team should always be on top of your list if you are a project manager. This article will talk about the key software development metrics and KPIs to identify the potential scope for improvement.

Thanks to the agile methods, the importance of measuring the overall productivity of a software team has increased slightly. Businesses are now keen to adopt software development metrics and have also started monitoring different KPIs to manage the quality gaps within the software product.

A software metrics is a key way of measuring quantifiable and countable characteristics of any software. The main aim here is to determine the quality of the current product or the process, plan work iterations and identify any potential areas for improvement.

Read this article to learn how you can measure essential aspects of your software development process. This article will talk about the basics of software metrics and would determine the important ones at length.

Let’s begin with understanding What are Software metrics?

What are Software Metrics?

A software metrics is a standard of measure which comprises various activities to estimate a software’s testing effort quality, progress and health. For example, the UX, process, formal code, functional, test metrics, etc will be helpful in setting clear business objectives and track software performance.

The right metrics here will allow you to measure the code complexity and productivity to streamline the project management. As a result, you can understand when your development team does best of their work, identify the bottlenecks in the project, reduce the risk elements and eliminate any forthcoming failure.

You can combine your management activities with software metrics to plan an impactful procedure, keep your production team informed, make an effective software maintenance plan and ultimately simplify development projects.

Now, further let us understand why you should track software metrics?

Why should you track software metrics?

By implementing an actionable data strategy across the complete software development life cycle is a sure shot method to innovate and improve the software. As a product owner, you need to look at the baseline data of your development team to experiment with the existing process and workflow.

Below are a few reasons for tracking software development metrics

• To evaluate the quality, health and progress of software testing
• To analyze the associated risks and flow efficiency
• To reduce frequent code changes and ensure a better stability in code.

Software development metrics - Examples

A wide range of software development metrics are available for tracking and measuring different components of the process.

Software metrics include, but are not limited to, developer, operational, test, and agile metrics. Operational metrics concentrate on system performance and dependability, while developer metrics are particular statistics used to evaluate the effectiveness, productivity, and quality of individual developers or development teams.

We'll dive into each metric category in detail as well as explore certain software metrics and their significance for software development in the sections that follow.

Let’s finally begin the discussion about different types of software development metrics.

Test metrics

These metrics are important for testers, agile teams and QA engineers who wish to advance their testing. The best method to enhance your testing is by opting for a relevant test statistic, setting up a baseline and then tracking your actual performance over the following few days, months or years.

Let’s understand a few types of Test metrics in the forthcoming section

Conversion rate

The conversion rate tells you the number of visitors that have completed various tasks like making a purchase and filling out a contact form, etc.

For example, if 1000 new people are visiting your website but only some 100 of them are completing the signup process, then there is a room for improvement within the product/service offering.

PULSE metric

This metric is more focused on measuring the business performance of the enterprise-grade software. This metric highlights technical or business aspects of the performance. The acronym PULSE stands for Page views, Uptime, latency, seven-day active users, and earnings.

Let us understand about what these terms exactly mean -

• The page view shows the number of visitors on your website.
• Uptime highlights the number of times a server is up and running.
• Latency shows the performance of the infrastructure of your website.
• Seven-day users shows the ability of the product to get repeat users within the initial seven days.
• Earnings show that your product is able to work or not.

Now, moving further let us talk about the agile metrics that can be a game changer.

Throughput

This metric measures the number of tasks, subtasks, features, bugs, etc. that developers complete within a specific given time in software development. This metric enables project managers to evaluate the work of their team members and understand the workload precisely.

Below is the formula for calculating Throughput -

R = I / T

Here R indicates Throughput rate, I indicates the amount of work and T shows the time.

Let us understand how we can calculate the Throughput rate with an example. Let’s assume your software development team has delivered 144 features within 12 hours of time, then your throughput rate would be -

R = 144 / 12 = 12 features

Net Promoter Score

In 2003, management consultant Fred Reichheld developed the Net Promoter Score, a customer loyalty indicator. It calculates an unambiguous and precise customer satisfaction rate that is comparable across many industries.

Furthermore, the Net Promoter Score evaluates the degree to which a participant would suggest a certain business, item, or service to their family members.

For example, you have released the MVP of your new program. You now wish to ascertain its performance. You then ask 200 users at random to assign a 1 to 10 rating to your software.

The users can be divided into three categories: promoters, detractors, and passives. Respondents who score nine or ten are considered promoters. Detractors provide ratings between 0 and 6, whereas passives award ratings between 7 and 8.

Code coverage

It makes it easier for software engineers to maintain the quality of their code. Additionally, it exposes developers to poor code on a constant basis, which finally maintains higher product quality.

The following formula can be used to determine code coverage:

(Total lines of code in a system component / Number of lines of code performed by a testing methodology) * 100

Let's use an example to help make code coverage more clear.

For example, suppose you have 200 lines of code in your software testing, and 100 of those lines have been validated.

Code coverage will therefore be equal to 100 / 200 * 100 = 50%.

Now, say you are a FinTech based business and you want to outsource software development from a reputed outsourced software development company, then make sure you evaluate all the above mentioned metrics thoroughly to achieve a successful software development project execution.

But, how to do that?

Partnering with an Outsourced Software Development Company

If you want to outsource software development for your Fintech business, it is important to evaluate the key metrics that align with your project goals.

Start by establishing clear and focused Key Performance Indicators which are SMART, i.e. Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-specific. For example, if your goal is to enhance user engagement in a  mobile app, then you might track metrics like user adoption rates and session duration.

Choose metrics that are most important for your objective, avoid unnecessary data that can complicate decision-making. Engage in regular assessments of Agile metrics like cycle time and team velocity to make sure your development process remains efficient.

Partnering with an outsourced software development company can help you implement software development processes in a smoother manner.

Now, let’s understand how Acquaint Softtech can help you in achieving a successful software development outsourcing,

How can Acquaint Softtech help?

Mr. Mukesh Ram's ambition of starting an IT outsourcing business came true in 2013. An Indian company called Acquaint Softtech focuses on IT staff augmentation and software development outsourcing.

At Acquaint Softtech, we specialize in helping business owners and entrepreneurs hire remote developers with the right skills to address skill scarcity in their IT departments.

As an official Laravel partner, we also provide MERN stack development and MEAN stack development services. It's recommended that your organization hire remote developers if it's having problems locating reasonably priced personnel for your in-house team.

Acquaint Softtech provides remote developers for as little as $15 per hour, whether you're looking to hire MEAN stack developers or hire MERN stack developers.

Wrapping up!

Whether you are opting for in-house software development or even if you’re opting for an outsourced software development focusing on software development metrics is essential to improve the quality of your product delivery.

In this article we covered everything that you should analyze before and after the launch of the product to achieve better results and business growth. So, if you’ve a software development idea in mind and if you want to turn the idea into a workable solution to grow your business then opting for an outsourced software development company should be your go-to idea.

Reach out to Acquaint softtech to fulfill your software development needs. Contact us today for any software development requirements or custom web app development requirements our team is always ready to help you!