Uplevel

There's telemetry for engineering systems, and then there's telemetry for engineering teams. They're not the same. Code is standardized, more or less. But every team is unique — the metrics of a healthy team can look completely different from organization to organization. What's missing from most "productivity" conversations (and most productivity data) is context of what's actually happening within your organization. For effective teams, that holistic context is critical. #developerproductivity #engineeringperformance #CTO

“For most organizations, half the time and half the money gets spent before a card ever gets to a development team’s backlog.” Flow metrics focus on value delivery rather than process efficiency or developer productivity, looking at the entire value stream so that enterprises can identify bottlenecks that lie outside the software team. Flow provides a high-level framework that enterprises will find especially valuable – as long as they combine it with other metrics. See our take in the comments 👇

Raise your hand if you had to add a label to a bunch of your Jira tickets this week. I know why we have to do it – to bridge the communication gap between the executive team and our engineering teams – but it doesn’t make Jira tickets any less tedious. Here’s where teams usually go wrong with Jira: The executive team sets priorities. We don’t give them licenses in Jira, so those priorities are in Confluence, or Notion, or a Google Doc. We take the priorities and start putting them into Jira. Each engineering team divides the work into smaller and smaller pieces until the details are hard to connect back to the starting priorities. Something is lost in the messy middle. That sparks a vicious cycle: ⭐️ Executives don’t see evidence that engineers are working on company priorities. ⭐️ Engineers have an added responsibility of drawing a clear line between priorities and tasks. The solution is to overhaul how you use Jira. There are thousands of ways to organize Jira. Only a few of those methods are effective at handling this scenario. One approach is to leverage an issue hierarchy, where initiative issues map directly to the company's key priorities, and epics with individual stories rolling up as child tickets underneath. This structure provides better visibility. It also allows for automatic association of labels and other metadata across the hierarchy. If you want to take this further… Use distinct Jira projects for each initiative. Nothing more clearly communicates all this work is for a specific initiative than naming the project after the priority. Remember to regularly review the status of those higher-level epics. Since individual engineers are working on stories and tasks, it can be easy to forget to update the Epic. Reviewing your Roadmap in planning ensures projects are taken to completion and nothing major falls through the cracks. #projectmanagement #engineering #CTO

Advice on #GenAI from Steve Morin of Asana: “If you don’t have a basis on this technology of where the limits are, at least at a high level, you’ll have no intuition on even what to challenge your teams on. And that’s dangerous.” Engineering leaders, how are you putting guidelines and guardrails in place for your teams' adoption of Copilot and other AI tools?

A new study from Uplevel Data Labs reveals a startling 41% increase in bugs when using GitHub Copilot's AI coding assistant. Is faster code worth the tradeoff in quality? How can engineering leaders put guardrails in place for Gen AI adoption? See the full research report with additional findings on Copilot's potential impact on efficiency and burnout risk (link in comments). #softwaredevelopment #developerproductivity #CTO #genai

JUST LET ME DO MY JOB That’s the slogan for one of 37signals Basecamp’s most successful ad campaigns. I love it - the capitalization of “S” is well done. The slogan was used to promote Jason Fried’s project management company and a related book. The general sentiment appealed to a deep angst amongst a lot of knowledge workers today: busywork is taking the place of focused work. How did we get here? Most developers wish they had more time to ideate, design and, of course, build. Most managers want their devs to spend more time writing code (just build). Leadership wants to build great products—which requires focused deep work time. So, if everyone is aligned, why does it feel so arduous to carve out deep work time? #deepwork #developerproductivity #cto