There is significant focus in the software development field on finding 10x Developers. We believe that, for enterprise IT groups in particular, 10x Teams are far more critical – team performance is a much better indicator of overall organizational outcomes. But getting to 10x Teams is becoming increasingly complicated in today’s world: new paradigms such as Gen AI, diverse sources of talent (incl. outsourcing), remote/hybrid working model are enablers of team performance but can also quickly become challenges.
Getting to 10x Teams requires us to be able to measure team performance with high confidence. While this has always been a tricky proposition, we have learnt a lot in the past two decades – at the minimum, we now know what not to do e.g.
Crude metrics such as lines of code do not work – in fact, great teams focus on getting compact, reusable code.
Using the metrics to compare one team to another would be inviting trouble, as most of the metrics are not necessarily comparable across teams.
While there is no universal alignment on the specific performance metrics for an engineering team, the DORA metrics and the SPACE framework have begun to establish the generally accepted standards over the last decade. The DORA group, in particular, established a scientific footing for the “four metrics that matter” and published their results in The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations. Consequently, several software companies are now offering tools to pull data from multiple sources (Jira/ADO, GitHub/BitBucket, ServiceNow etc. – here forth termed as “source systems”) and create engineering performance metrics.
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