Engineering Productivity Module

Engineering Productivity Module

The Engineering Productivity Module empowers engineering teams to improve productivity and developer flow. Engineering leads and managers no longer need to jump between reports and tools to monitor key performance indicators, understand bottlenecks across the Software Development Life Cycle and improve agility and developer satisfaction.

Based on the SPACE framework, it synthesizes the most important updates for your team into a single, cohesive view of velocity, collaboration, execution, and developer flow and sentiment, and provides industry benchmarks to measure up against high-performing teams.

 

Accessing the Engineering Productivity Module

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To access this module, go to Dashboards > Dashboards Directory > Faros Reports > Engineering Productivity.

You can also access it from the Modules drop-down at the top of the screen.

 

Engineering Productivity Module Dashboards

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The Engineering Productivity module is composed of two dashboards: Organization Engineering Productivity, at the organizational level, and Team Engineering Productivity Summary, at the team level.

 

Organization Engineering Productivity Summary Dashboard

The Organization Engineering Productivity dashboard provides a holistic view of engineering productivity, with key insights into engineering velocity, collaboration, execution, developer flow and sentiment. Each dimension is covered in a separate tab, as detailed below.

For each dimension, a smart AI summary is provided at the top, summarizing key takeaways and providing recommendations based on Faros proprietary data and benchmarks. Note that it may take a few seconds to load.

All metrics can be segmented by team, and a specific time period, using filters at the top of the page. 

• The desired team can be set using the Teams filter and defaults to all teams. You can also click on any of the team traces to drill down to a specific team.
• The desired time period is set by the Date filter and defaults to the previous 90 days. 

Additional filters (by Repo, Board, Sprint and Release Name) are also available for corresponding tabs.

Velocity Tab

The Velocity tab helps you monitor PR and Task Cycle Times, as well as PR Merge Rates and Task Completion to drive efficiency and performance. Based on VCS and TMS data, it includes proprietary Faros benchmarks, trends over time and break-down by team and stages to help spot unusual patterns, spikes, and bottlenecks, per team.

It is composed of the following metrics:

 

Organization Engineering Productivity Goal Detail Dashboard

The Organization Engineering Productivity Goal Detail dashboard provides a closer look at engineering progress towards release goals, displaying potential factors such as ratio of unplanned to total work, open to in-progress tasks, and task time spent in different stages.

The dashboard is structured into two primary sections: Goal Progress Drivers and Goal Progress by Sub-Org.

The Goal Progress Drivers section analyzes the type and stage of the work in progress. It is composed of the following metrics:

 

The Goal Progress by Sub-Org section surfaces related trends for each sub-org. It is composed of the following metrics:

 

Organization Engineering Productivity Velocity Dashboard

The Organization Engineering Productivity Velocity dashboard provides a closer look at velocity metrics across and within the organization, in order to identify bottlenecks and areas for improvement.

The dashboard is structured into two primary sections: Velocity by Task Stage and Velocity by Sub-Org.

The Velocity by Task Stage section gives an in depth view at velocity by stage to help identify bottlenecks. 

Note: All the charts in this section include steps from flows that have not yet completed, so results may differ slightly from other completed-flow metrics. This helps identify emerging bottlenecks and taking corrective action faster. As such, results may differ slightly from other completed-flow metrics. 

It is composed of the following metrics:

The Velocity by Sub-Org section helps identify high performing teams within an organization and replicate best practices.  It is composed of the following metrics:

 

Team Engineering Productivity Summary Dashboard

The Team Engineering Productivity Summary dashboard provides metrics at the team level.

The dashboard is structured into two primary sections: Progress Against Engineering Goals and Engineering Velocity.

The Progress Against Engineering Goals section shows where a team stands compared to its current goals and highlights other engineering tasks that may be causing delays. It is composed of the following metrics:

The Engineering Velocity section provides additional context in the form of velocity metrics. It is composed of the following metrics:

 

Setting up the Engineering Productivity Module

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The Engineering Productivity Module is centered around 4 key metrics:

• Progress to Goal
• Planned and Unplanned work
• Task Cycle Time
• Pull Request Merge Rate

To compute each of these metrics, several data sources should be connected to the Faros platform, as detailed in the following sections.

Note: For most of the sources below, you will find handy validation dashboards in the Getting Started folder under Faros Reports. These dashboards are provided to all Faros customers and let you inspect the data coming from different sources such as version control systems or task management systems.

Platform Prerequisites

The following should be set up on Faros in order to get the full functionality of the Engineering Productivity module:

• Version control, VCS: The data will be used to access deployment data to calculate PR merge rate. Team membership of the PR author is also used for team attribution.

• Organization and Team Members: This will allow Faros to know the teams in your organization, the reporting structure, and the size of each team.

• Team Attribution: To help determine which team each of the metrics is associated with

  • Board Ownership: For bugs (unplanned work)

Progress to Goal

Schema location: tms_Task

Sources: Task Management, TMS

Validation Dashboard: TMS Source Metrics

Releases should be defined in your Task Management System that have both a start date and a release date, and the tasks required to complete the release should be linked to it as well. The “Board Ownership” association will determine which team a release on a board belongs to. As work on the release progresses, you are able to see how far you are ahead of schedule or behind based on the number of tasks completed, not yet completed, and the amount of time remaining until the release.

Planned and unplanned work

Schema location: tms_Task

Sources: Task Management, TMS

Validation Dashboard: TMS Source Metrics

Tasks of type “Bug” should be reported to the Faros platform and are considered “unplanned work”. The “Board Ownership” association will determine what team the bugs belong to and the Org/Team setup will determine the number of developers on a team.

Task Cycle Time

Schema location: tms_Task

Sources: Task Management, TMS

Validation Dashboard: TMS Source Metrics

Requires tasks status to first move into an “In Progress”-type state and then later to a “Done”-type state. Board Ownership determines which team the tasks belong to.

Pull Request Merge Rate

Schema location: vcs_PullRequest

Sources: VCS

Validation Dashboard: VCS Source Metrics

The average number of pull requests merged per month per person on a team is calculated using the “merged at” timestamp of a pull request and the number of team members on the pull request author’s team.