Engineering Productivity via Metrics
Even at a startup, engineering teams can grow quickly, with a proliferation of tools, teams. processes, agile methodologies, meetings, interviews and so on. How does one begin to think about getting a pulse on how the teams are performing, how code is being delivered, what are the obstacles that developers are facing? Where do you start? We addressed the problem by taking a stock of all things in flight, starting to think about how to even begin assigning metrics to seemingly intangible things like developer happiness and related obstacles Having one source of truth for all these metrics, not only made our lives easier, but also to the developers, where they could see clearly what was working and what wasn't. Quality and quick reviews, focus and friction time. work in progress for developers, having a handle on CI/CD metrics and surfacing other metrics from the Engineering Efficiency team help us move the needle. Putting this data in the hands of the developers helped crowd source other areas of improvement that they themselves came up with. The key learnings from this session include appreciating the problem space, practical metrics that would resonate with their developers, and how to have measurable success in an area that can be hard to solution - engineering productivity.
Nagesh Chetan is an accomplished technology leader with over 15 years of success in the financial services, hedge funds and most recently in the Customer Data Platform space. He is passionate about people management and has managed teams with over 14 people under him, including managers, that are both local and offshore. He enjoys building and designing real time systems that deal with client flows and data flows, financial services and a host of other verticals more recently. He has experience in build vs buy strategies for technology solutions and has excellent relationships with vendors. Nagesh is an active tennis player, competing in national tennis leagues. He also serves on the board of Photoville in New York City and volunteers with New York Cares. He has a Masters in Computer Science from Stonybrook University, NY and a undergraduate degree (B.E. Comp Sci.) from PESIT, Bengaluru.