Performance measurement of the employees is a crucial job for every business. Today, with the increasing demand for software usability in the market, the necessity to measure a developer’s performance has taken a high rise.

Managers have to keep an eye on the performance of the software engineers to know how the team is working. Engineers need feedback to look into the areas where they are lacking. This helps them to improve their skills and to upgrade the quality of the software. Also, it helps to solve the bottlenecks of the project at the early stage.

Let’s understand this concept by looking into the figure below-

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While the developer is writing the code at that time, it is relatively easy to detect the issues. But as the stage goes further into the testing part, even it is possible to find the mistakes. But once the software gets released, it becomes drastically tricky to find the errors and look at the cost the company has to suffer from in managing it.

To avoid such cases, it is pretty essential to form a potent strategy to assess developers’ performance. To make your job a little easier, do refer to this article as it will present the best ways to measure their performance.

Let’s get started.

Ways To Evaluate Developer’s Performance

According to a survey, there were about 26,4 million software developers in 2019 globally, which is expected to reach 27,7 million in 2023. Having this vast developer base, the strategies to handle their performance also differs.

However, there are many tactics to measure the performance of the workforce, including software engineers. The most appropriate one is setting up OKRs for all employees using factoHR's performance management solution. The manager can handle everything using a single system, from creating the goals, aligning workforce targets with the company’s missions, to reviewing them. Such a system in the workplace will help to put more insight into the employee’s performance and the hurdles they come across in accomplishing their tasks.

Further, let’s go through the following points where the key performance metrics are shown that helps in evaluating the developer’s performance.

To find the best tactics, refer to the following point as it will show the most valuable tactics to evaluate developers’ performance.

• Throughput

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Throughput is a kind of measurement that is performed at specified intervals to evaluate the efficiency of the developers. This works as an alignment aspect that helps to know whether the team is working as per the goals set for them or not. It shows the number of features, bugs, tasks, and chores that are prepared to go into the test mode.

The work output is typically represented by a term called tickets which shows the amount of work completed in a particular time. If your primary focus lies on releasing a bug-free module, your concern should remain towards maximum resolving of the tickets by the developers.

Depending on the throughput metric, you can determine the point where the team is suffering and accordingly give a solution for them. Such responses make them better developers that ultimately improve their performance.

• Cycle Time

Here cycle time = total time.

Total time is defined as the time required to complete the task from the very beginning. This performance measurement criterion helps to know about the speed of your software engineers in performing tasks. Knowing so helps the managers to know the issues developers are facing and helps in giving the right solutions to them to increase the effectiveness of their coding.

This works as a source of motivation for the software engineer team, where they can apply the feedback directly to the process to execute the process quickly.

• Efficiency

It is always appreciated to have more efficiency as it directly increases the effectiveness of the code for the business. If an engineer is working on an entirely new project, then his efficiency will be relatively low. Based on the tasks given to them, you can determine their efficiency in performing them.

This helps you to know about their efficiency rate, and accordingly, you can ask them about the difficulties they are facing. This helps you to form better strategies that guide them to improve their efficiency.

• Code Churn

This aspect represents editing of a particular work performed by the developers recently. It typically changes as per the expertise of the developers, team members, and projects. Here the term edit means any changes they made in the file itself, like file, function, or class. Many engineers consider it as the best source of indicator for determining the quality of the code.

The considerable scale of churn rate will show how the developer is working on the particular part of the project. If you find a sudden increase in the speed of the churn rate, it is indicating that the developer is regularly editing the code of the particular feature. This shows that the software engineer is finding difficulties in a particular project. Knowing so helps in supporting them.

• Sprint Burndown

Sprint burndown is an aspect that shows the visibility of the work performed by the team. It is a graphical representation that shows the number of days required to complete the task on the x-axis and the work performed on the y-axis. Further extending this, it shows the amount of work completed and how much is still left. The figure below shows the burndown chart to understand this point better-

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The ultimate goal behind this chart is to know how the progress is made towards completing the project. The fluctuation shown in the figure is based on the workability of the team. After completion of a particular part of the work, the subtraction is performed from the last point to estimate the next point. This is how this aspect works till the entire project finishes.

Final Words

Performance measurement is not at all an easy job for software measurement. It demands much attentiveness from their side as much as finding a bug in the programming. The tactics mentioned are some of the best ways you can refer and utilize in determining the performance of your developer team. Once you add the right aspects in the performance evaluation stage, you will definitely get a potent and efficient software developer team.