Data over emotions: how metrics support your decisions
Length:
4 min
Published:
November 16, 2020
Nobody enjoys making hard calls that can cost real money or directly affect the team. Those calls get even harder when you have no data to lean on and you have to go on gut feeling alone.
Metrics give you something to lean on
"You can't improve what you can't measure" sounds like a cliché, but data really is one of your best allies when you decide whether to pay for a service or hire another developer. The choice sits with you as the team lead, and these calls are genuinely hard.
Not sure whether to hire that new front-end developer because you don't know if the team actually needs one? Look at your team's stats. Missing deadlines and your average PR resolution time is four months? There's your answer.
MIT Sloan professors Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson ran a study with MIT's Center for Digital Business. It found that data-driven companies see 4% higher productivity and 6% higher profits. The companies they surveyed ranged from small startups to multi-million conglomerates, and they all reported the same thing: data-driven decisions help across every level and department, from HR to business development.
Which metrics can guide your decisions?
Let's focus on decisions about your team. Many of these metrics line up closely with good Developer Experience. You can measure your team's performance with:
- Average PR resolve time — how long it takes to review and merge a pull request;
- Average time to solve a PR — the full lifecycle from opening to closing;
- Security issues — the number of vulnerabilities in your codebase;
- Code style issues — indicators of consistency and maintainability;
- Outdated libraries — technical debt from unmaintained dependencies.
These look like separate signals, but they tie together, and a strong team needs to handle all of them. There are many more ways to judge a team's quality, and let's be honest: not all of them are measurable.
The right tools lead to the right decisions
To back up your decisions and keep an eye on your Developer Experience, you can reach for the available tools. Unlike User Experience, DX is a fairly young field, so there are not many complete tools to be your go-to place yet.
Our DX Scanner, built by seasoned developers and team leads at DX Heroes, pulls all the important data and metrics into a single dashboard. It is by far the most complete tool on the market right now. On that dashboard you find everything you need to make decisions about your team and improve your Developer Experience.
I won't oversell it, because the product speaks for itself. You can try DX Scanner for free: Try DX Scanner
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