Agile metrics are key performance indicators (KPIs) that help measure, evaluate, and optimize the efficiency of Agile software development practices, processes, and outputs. They provide visibility into how well Agile teams are delivering value, enabling data-driven decisions, and fostering continuous improvement. Agile metrics sit under the broader umbrella of software engineering metrics, which track code quality, system performance, release velocity, and more.

Good software development teams are focused on outputs, and can bring key metrics to bear that illustrate just what the engineering organization is building on a daily, monthly and yearly basis. Developer productivity is often assessed retrospectively: if the team is hitting DORA metrics, we assume everything in the lifecycle before production is sound. But the best teams dig deeper, and aim to solve the problem backwards as well as forwards by looking at the process as well as the results.

Even the most reliable and well-designed software systems experience failures. Tracking incident response metrics helps teams strengthen both organizational preparedness and system resilience by uncovering trends, gaps, and opportunities for improvement. In short, important metrics for incident management are: Understanding these metrics helps engineering leaders improve service uptime, meet SLAs, and align operational capacity.

Jellyfish is one of the most popular engineering management platforms, offering comprehensive insights into engineering organizations, their tasks, and operational processes. Engineering management platforms aggregate and analyze metrics from various tools and systems that enable the software delivery process and development lifecycle. Jellyfish and other engineering management platforms aim to connect key development processes and decisions to overarching business goals.

Notifications are designed to be annoying. Think of your phone buzzing in a quiet room: it demands your attention, lighting up your screen and making noise so you look at it. A notification is supposed to pull you away from whatever you’re working on. They can be useful, but they can also be a nuisance.

In cultures of continuous improvement, the criteria by which teams define a release's fitness for production is flexible by definition. Engineering organizations strive to balance risk and velocity, aiming for high quality releases on a cadence that doesn’t impede overall business throughput.

Commercial Internal Developer Portals (IDPs) are a valuable investment for teams that want to move quickly toward addressing initiatives surrounding software ownership, production readiness, and improving developer experience. But there's a common misconception that all commercial internal developer portals (IDPs) carry an inherent risk of “vendor lock-in” vs open-source alternatives like Backstage.

Metrics provide visibility into engineering operations, allowing teams to iteratively improve. By tracking key data points like deployment frequency, lead time, server uptime, and change fail rate over time, organizations can spot trends, compare against benchmarks, and address process inefficiencies.

Internal Developer Portals and platforms do a lot—they're an all-in-one system of record, lever for defining and driving best practice, and vehicle for creating new software components. It's not hard to understand why undertaking such a project can be labor and resource intensive. But it doesn't necessarily have to be.

There is nothing more valuable to an organization than data—about customers, products, opportunities, gaps... the list goes on. We know that to maximize value streams for the business we need to turn a critical eye to data related to how each group operates, including software development teams. In 2019 a group known as the DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) team set out to find a universally applicable framework for doing just that.