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Engineering metrics for high-performing teams

Swarmia gives engineering leaders, managers, and teams access to non-toxic engineering metrics — including DORA and SPACE. Here’s what you can (and can’t) measure with Swarmia.

Trusted by effective engineering organizations

Drive positive change with healthy metrics

Connect the dots between GitHub, Jira/Linear, and Slack

Get relevant metrics for every level of the engineering organization

No harmful leaderboards or data on individual performance

What type of engineering metrics can I measure with Swarmia?

Swarmia is not just a dashboard for the engineering leadership. In addition to high-level metrics, it also gives teams visibility into their workflow and possible bottlenecks.

Business impact

Quickly understand how much time your engineering organization is spending on different types of work.

Use these insights to guide your engineering teams' focus between roadmap work, chores, refactoring, firefighting, bug fixing, unplanned work, and/or any other categories you may want to track.

Investment insights in Swarmia

Flow

Flow metrics like pull request cycle time, cycle time for issues, and deployment frequency allow engineering teams to see how well the engine is running.

By analyzing outliers and periods of inactivity, you'll be able to recognize and resolve systemic issues that negatively impact throughput. Additionally, Swarmia's Slack notifications nudge your team to keep code flowing and cycle times low.

Flow insights in Swarmia

Team and code health

There are two ways you can look at the health of an engineering organization: the health of the team and the quality of the code they write.

Swarmia helps you build good habits like limiting work in progress, working together on bigger issues, and evenly distributing code reviews within the team. You can also easily keep track of bugs and their share of all work.

Swarmia's working agreements
Swarmia gives us the perfect overview of engineering productivity. I can quickly see how we're doing in terms of cycle time and pull requests, which helps me report back to the business.
Roland Fiala
SVP of Engineering, Productsup

It's hard to improve what you don't measure

Here are some of the healthy engineering metrics you’ll see in Swarmia.

Cycle time

Cycle time

Understand how long it takes for your team to complete pull requests, tasks, stories, and epics.

Deployment frequency

Deployment frequency

Keep track of how often you're deploying — and how often the deployments are failing.

Investment distribution

Investment distribution

Know what your engineering teams are working on and establish the right balance between different types of work.

Bug Insights

Bug Insights

Stay on top of the bugs your team is working on and the time it takes to fix them.

Batch size

Batch size

Keep your batch size small to roll out features to customers faster and with less risk.

CI insights

CI insights

Spot flaky tests and improve the performance of your CI pipeline.

Review time

Review time

Identify review bottlenecks and get your work merged faster.

Review rate

Review rate

Maintain high code quality by maximizing the percentage of code that gets reviewed before it's merged.

WIP limits

WIP limits

Allow teams to set their own work in progress limits to boost focus and productivity.

There are some things you can’t measure with Swarmia

Just because you can measure a certain metric doesn’t mean you should. We’ve consciously left out some engineering metrics that typically do more harm than good.

Developer stack ranking

Swarmia focuses on improving development productivity on the team and organization level. That's why you won't find developer leaderboards or other harmful activity metrics in Swarmia.

Lines of code (LOC)

Lines of code is a terrible measure of engineering productivity. In fact, Swarmia only surfaces lines of code in the context of batch size and code review notifications.

Code churn and rework

We believe that rewriting your own code is a perfectly acceptable way to solve complex problems. That's why you won't be able to track code churn or rework with Swarmia.

Explore next

Working Agreements

Exposing the right metrics is just the first step. To make sure your insights don't just sit on a dashboard, Swarmia allows your teams to set their own Working Agreements.

Swarmia is how the best teams get better. Get started with a demo or a 14-day trial.

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