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What metrics do engineering teams usually use?
What metrics do engineering teams usually use?

Northstar metrics for engineering teams

Julian Colina avatar
Written by Julian Colina
Updated over a week ago

Once you have Haystack set up for your teams, if you are wondering what metrics you actually care about and how to make sense of all the data, that's a great question.

Though a lot of this is very specific to teams and your organization, you can use the following 7 metrics as a good starting point.

Change Lead Time

Change Lead Time is one of the Four Key DevOps Metrics defined in the Accelerate book and in Google’s State of DevOps reports.

It measures the most predictable and easy-to-optimize part of the development lifecycle - first commit to deployment.

Deployment Frequency

This again is a part of the Four Key DevOps Metrics and measures the number of deployments made to production per week. Knowing your deployment frequency helps understand the rate at which you are delivering value to customers.

Throughput

Throughput is the number of pull-requests that have been merged in a given timeframe. It gives you a picture of how much work your team can typically accomplish.

Change Failure Rate

Change Failure Rate tells us the percentage of deployments that created a production failure- this tells you how robust and reliable your deployment process is.

MTTR

Mean Time To Recover is the average time it takes to recover from a product or system failure. Mean time to recovery is an essential metric in incident management as it shows how quickly you solve downtime incidents and get your systems back up and running.

Full Resolution Time for Bugs

Time it takes to resolve a bug when it is raised with an engineering team. Resolving bugs quickly after they are reported can directly play an important role in optimizing customer satisfaction. Full Resolution Time is an excellent way to measure this.

Sprint Predictability

Predictable delivery helps to build trust and is likely to result in better outcomes for customers and more autonomy for teams.

And that's about it. You might not always need to track all of these and often teams select a few metrics from the above list as the key metrics for their teams. We recommend selecting at least one of each category to get a complete view of your engineering team

  • Speed

  • Quality

  • Predictability

On the other hand, if you are looking for even more metrics, explore our "More Reports" page to find tons of other metrics Haystack offers.

If you are still confused and aren't sure about setting goals for your team, please feel free to schedule a call with us and we are more than happy to help you with it.

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