The Developer Velocity Index: Increasing Software Development Excellence and Driving Business Growth
Organizations across industries continually seek digital methods to boost productivity, efficiency, and business transformation through software development. Productivity is the number of business functionality generated for a specific amount of money (for example, $100,000 invested). Productivity is also known as velocity. This is not a measure of value; instead, it measures the amount of functionality produced.
One of the most significant barriers to innovation for organizations of all sizes and industries is outdated, legacy technology. These old systems, procedures, and manual processes block development teams and make keeping up with competition and market demands today extremely hard. To address these limitations, the most popular method is to upgrade all areas of digital technology with automated, scalable, and flexible solutions. Doing this effectively requires companies to achieve superior Developer Velocity.
Suppose you are working in a software company with other developers like you, whether your company is an enterprise or a small business. In that case, your focus should encompass more than just moving from one task to another on the most basic level. For example, if your primary goal is to ship code quickly, which I believe is a good thing and something that any developer wants (after all, who wouldn’t want to be able to move through their backlog as fast as possible)? You can miss out on the benefits of investing in how your code is built and tested and how well the developers interact and collaborate.
Software development is essential to how businesses operate. To drive business performance, increasing developer velocity is crucial. It is about establishing the right environment and reducing barriers to innovation for developers.
Over the last decade, software developer velocity has become a popular metric in technology circles. In 2011, the Agile Alliance named “developer density” as one of 5 critical metrics of agile performance. Larry Maccherone, one of the leaders of The Agile Alliance, wrote that “the goal is to optimize developer work time and reduce queues (wait times).”
In 2018, research firm Gartner found that 55 percent of CIOs believe businesses should increase their focus on developer velocity.
What exactly is developer velocity?
Developer Velocity is the ability to drive transformative business performance through software development. In other words, a measure of how fast developers can go from idea to production. This is achieved by empowering developers, creating the right environment for them to innovate, and removing friction points.
Developer velocity is usually measured as a unitless value representing the number of features and story points (or lines of code) delivered in a fixed period (sprint, day, week, or month).
For example, if an organization or team delivers ten features in one week, their velocity will be ten features per week (FPW).
Developer velocity isn’t only about speeding delivery; it’s also about releasing developer ingenuity and transforming developers’ ideas into software that supports your customers’ needs and your company's objectives.
Why is Developer Velocity Important?
The topic of developer velocity is critical for several reasons.
First, in many circumstances, developer velocity is directly responsible for the success or failure of a software development project, significantly larger projects with short development cycles.
Second, a lack of focus on developer velocity can lead to volatile development processes affected by challenges comparable to those encountered in traditional waterfall-type projects.
Third, by focusing on increasing developer velocity, significant gains can be realized and sustained over time; these improvements frequently transfer directly into business performance.
Achieving its goals requires a business to achieve superior Developer Velocity Index (DVI) scores. The Velocity Index is a new metric that quantifies the productivity of a developer organization over time. It’s an open-source project on GitHub that allows you to track how your team is performing and how they compare to others in the industry. You can use this data to improve your team’s performance or benchmark against other teams to see how they compare.
The Velocity Index was created in partnership between GitHub and Microsoft Research Lab in Cambridge, one of the world’s leading research institutions dedicated to advancing software engineering practice through research in programming languages, compilers, operating systems, networking, and security. Microsoft Research inspired the project in Cambridge research into software engineering practices that drive productivity, such as pair programming and code review.
The idea is to provide a more holistic view of developer productivity by considering factors like how developers feel about their work and their relationships with other team members.
To create the new metric, Microsoft researchers interviewed over 300 software developers across several industries over the course of six months. They found that developers who felt respected by their colleagues were more likely to collaborate with them on projects or share information about their workflows with each other — actions that boosted efficiency.
* You can do a self-assessment here: https://developervelocityassessment.com/
The Developer Velocity Index measures how fast and effective an organization is in developing software applications that drive business growth.
According to a McKinsey report titled “Developer Velocity: How software excellence fuels business performance”, the Developer Velocity Index (DVI) was selected as one comprehensive metric to demonstrate what it takes for an organization to have tech intensity.
Organizations with the highest “Developer Velocity Index (DVI)” outperformed the market by 4–5 times revenue growth and 55% higher innovation. (“Measured by the level of adoption of new technologies and ability to innovate faster and beat the competition through innovation-led growth”).
Factors Impacting Developer Velocity
Many factors can impact how quickly a development team can develop products to fulfill business goals. The following are the most common obstacles that can slow developer velocity:
- A codebase that is not capable of supporting continuous integration, testing, and deployment.
- Changing the context between feature development and operational activities.
- Distractions prevent engineers from completing in-depth and innovative work.
- Investment in tools, methods, and training to encourage innovation is lacking.
- A complex organizational structure makes team coordination difficult.
How to help developers to build software faster
- Effective and timely communication
The best way to avoid misunderstandings is to communicate clearly. Developers should have access to the same information as other team members.
- Quick installation of the development environment (docker, etc.)
Make sure that the development environment is set up before the software development process so that new developers can get started as soon as possible without wasting time setting up their devices every time.
- Clear brief, written document, fewer meetings
Instead of speaking in person or listening to an audio recording, developers prefer to read text. The time spent in meetings can be saved by having a technical brief that is well-written, concise, and clear. Assigning all tasks with brief descriptions that include the acceptance criteria is also essential. Additionally, the organization will significantly benefit from carefully documenting the issues during meetings to develop a shared institutional memory (corporate memory).
- Continuous, iterative monitoring and improvement
A crucial part of continuous improvement is monitoring your development environment, which includes everything from code quality and test coverage to performance metrics and code complexity. How do you know if it’s getting better or worse if you don't measure it? Continuous monitoring allows teams to identify problems early on to be corrected before they become serious issues.
Developers need access to real-time data about their performance indicators (e.g., code coverage, test coverage, etc.). This will help them identify future improvements based on historical data and trends.
- Analysis of developers’ time and automating manual work
Time is money in software development. Developers spend most of their time working on tasks that could be automated, for example, refactoring old code or fixing bugs that should never have happened in the first place. If you want to build software faster and improve developer velocity, you should start automating everything that can be automated!
- Continuous integration, iteration, deployment
Continuous integration (CI) ensures that all developers' changes are integrated into one build and tested before being deployed into production. This ensures that code changes don’t break anything in existing functionality and allows teams to get early feedback about bugs before they become serious problems.
Conclusion
Developer velocity is a significant driver of business performance. Excellent software development teams can help businesses achieve their goals by delivering high-quality products quickly and efficiently. This is why developer velocity is such an important metric to track.
If you’re interested in joining a high-performing software development team, check out our job listings. We’re always looking for talented individuals who can help us push the boundaries of what’s possible.
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