In software development, the quantitative measures of a project play a vital role in its management and success. These quantitative measures, more commonly known as metrics, give leaders concrete insights to take actions and modify their procedures for better development of the product.

While many organizations don’t pay a lot of heed to such metrics, it is important to know that there are a few key performance indicators that can help to achieve new heights seamlessly, but only if they are paid proper attention.

In this article, we have outlined some of the top software engineering metrics of 2021. By monitoring them effectively, organizations can track the progress of their project and ensure high-quality development.

  1. Lead Time–The time taken by your team to convert an idea’s draft into a product is depicted by the “lead time” metric. It is best to keep the lead time as low as possible so that you can be more responsive to customers and progress quickly. This can be done by reducing the waiting time for decision-making in your internal teams and simplifying the entire decision-making process.
  2. Active Days–The time taken by your development team to deliver the code of the project is depicted by the “active days” metric. This metric does not count the time taken by administrative tasks and planning work. It is mainly monitored to find out the hidden costs of interruptions.
  3. Production–Production metrics depict the measurement of productivity of your development team. They help team leaders to find the loopholes where their teams are lacking and speed up the process. Also, production metrics measure the software’s performance in its production environment, which is usually depicted by the application crash rate (the number of times an application fails divided by the number of times it was used), MTBF, and MTTR.
    • Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) and Mean Time To Repair (MTTR) – While MTBF depicts the mean time between system failures or breakdowns, MTTR shows the average time it is going to take to fix the failure and recover from it. MTBF and MTTR usually go hand in hand, as both of them are used to describe the behavior of your software in its development/production environment.
  4. Security – Security metrics are the most crucial metrics that must be taken seriously by all teams. These metrics play a crucial role in depicting your software’s quality while ensuring that all loopholes and gaps with potential security threats are revealed. Usually, endpoint incidents and MTTR form vital components of security metrics.
  • Endpoint Incidents–The number of devices or endpoints that may have been exposed to a virus are depicted by the “endpoint incidents” metric. These endpoints can include hardware devices like mobile devices, workstations, etc., that may have been infected with a virus at a certain point in time.
  • MTTR – For security metrics, MTTR depicts the time taken between identifying a security breach and deploying a working solution to combat it. So, for security purposes, MTTR should be tracked at specific intervals, as the growth or reduction in the size of this metric portrays if the development team is becoming more effective in handling bugs and security issues or not.
  1. Customer Satisfaction – Every business that is successful has high customer satisfaction rates. Hence, you must pay proper attention to customer satisfaction metrics so that you can find out the reasons behind poor customer experiences of some clients to work on those drawbacks for avoiding them in the future and increasing customer satisfaction rates. Some of the popularly used customer satisfaction metrics are NPS and CSS.
  • Net Promoter Score (NPS) – This metric helps you to measure your customers’ loyalty by questioning them about their willingness to recommend your brand to others. While it does not help you find out the reason behind poor scores, it gives you the percentage of customers unhappy with the service which can give you a good insight into how much effort you need to put in modifying your processes.
  • Customer Service Satisfaction (CSS) – This metric allows you to seek feedback via interaction with customers in the form of pop-ups, live chats, surveys, forms, etc. With the help of this metric, you can spot patterns and upgrade your software development services accordingly.

Customer satisfaction metrics may not directly affect the intricate development of your software, but they help you to formulate better procedures to increase client retention. By implementing the fitting customer satisfaction metrics, you can find out the key areas where your clients are facing troubles and then modify those procedures accordingly so that the project can progress seamlessly while ensuring high customer satisfaction rates.

Conclusion

Software engineering metrics play a vital role in improving an organization’s quality of software development. In 2021, the world has adjusted well to working remotely and outsourcing software development projects to achieve better results in a cost-effective manner. The metrics mentioned in this article not only help organizations to monitor the software engineering proceedings in their organization itself but also come in handy for monitoring the software development projects that they have outsourced to remote teams. Having said that, these metrics are subject to change to every organization and project. Every customer is different, which means that every project’s requirements and priorities are different. So, it is possible for the use of metrics to change from one organization to another. However, even then, the use of these metrics can help organizations to discover hidden loopholes in their organization and achieve optimum levels of software engineering to achieve high levels of success.