Understanding BlueOptima’s Developer Analytics

Providing Insights to Effectively Manage Performance

BlueOptima’s Developer Analytics (DA) is a market-leading software development analytics platform. It enables IT and software leaders to align with strategic goals through actionable insights as well as improving developer productivity and code maintainability. Developer Analytics empowers objective decision-making across an entire software development estate.

By utilising this metric to pinpoint opportunities for growth or efficiencies across different teams or projects, IT leaders can be confident in their decision. Not only can strategic choices be made with more precision, but their effectiveness can be analysed for a business's future.

BlueOptima’s Metrics

Analysing up to 36 static source code metrics, Developer Analytics generates a single objective productivity metric that is language-agnostic and truly reflects the level of meaningful change made to source code.

Actual Coding Effort (ACE) and Billable Coding Effort (BCE): These are two data-points based on 36 metrics combined with three dimensions of code changes: volume, complexity, and interrelatedness. This creates a representation of a developer's output in terms of their intellectual effort delivered within their code changes.

Analysis of Relative Thresholds (ART): This metric is designed to help organisations improve and maintain a high quality of code. It is expressed as the proportion of Coding Effort that makes source code less maintainable, or ‘aberrant’.

The Team Lead Dashboard (TLD)

One component of Developer Analytics, the ‘Team Lead Dashboard’ (TLD), provides team leads with insights to effectively manage performance. This includes supporting an increase in an individual’s productivity as well as the quality of their coding outputs into the estate.

Key Aspects of the Team Lead Dashboard

Visibility into Team Performance: The Team Lead Dashboard provides team leaders with granular visibility into the performance of their teams at a sprint-level.

Task Type Distribution: Enabling team leads to identify the amount of Coding Effort (CE) invested in each task type. Incrementally and iteratively, they are able to improve resource planning and task allocation for future sprints.

Pull Request Analysis: Giving visibility across the pull request process, team leads are supported in increasing the velocity of their team without risking code quality.

Maintainability Insights: Driving higher quality code, team leads are able to identify the influences determining their estate’s maintainability score. This allows for understanding the necessary actions required to resolve issues and increase the quality of coding outputs.

Sprint Retrospective: With BlueOptima’s unique source code analytics powering the task data, team leads can filter the data by sprint levels. This provides full visibility of a team’s productivity and code quality metrics as well as their sprint velocity and accuracy.

Benefits and Value for IT and Software Leaders

Unified View: Developer Analytics provides a unified and comprehensive view of software development productivity across a company’s codebase with language-agnostic metrics.

Transparency: It creates transparency across the intellectual effort used to create a code change and the quality of the code.

Automatic Integration: Developer Analytics is designed to integrate seamlessly into the software development process; it runs automatically and doesn’t require any manual actions from developers or managers to scan for new coding changes.

Data-Driven Decisions: Provides a basis for data-driven decisions by executive and IT leaders. To assure the accuracy of metrics, BlueOptima’s proprietary benchmarking algorithm is powered by the analysis of almost 9 billion code revisions while the model itself has been proven with more than 10 years of continuous research and development.

Early Risk Mitigation: The platform scans for code changes on a daily basis so customers can identify red flags during the early stage of a project. This allows for managing software investments and mitigating the risk of experimentation.

Strategic Alignment: It enables objective metrics to be adopted across an organisation, supporting companies in aligning strategic goals on all levels of an organisation’s hierarchy.

Enhanced Efficiency: BlueOptima’s proprietary Coding Effort (CE) and Analysis of Relative Thresholds (ART) metrics are designed to enable enhanced efficiency and effectiveness across software teams.

Actionable Recommendations: The ‘Maintainability Report’ page within the platform includes actionable recommendations for the causes of issues with code quality and possible resolutions.

Use Cases: Where to use Developer Analytics

Accelerating High Performance: Tracking performance along a variety of aspects helps accelerate transformation to a high-performing technology organisation. High performers work incessantly to get better at what they do.

Maintaining Agility: Constant revision of internal processes and software development practices is required to deliver reliable software faster than others. Developer Analytics gives insights into productivity so actions are informed and swift when issues occur, maintaining efficiency without jeopardising agility.

Vendor Management: Many companies struggle to establish reliable relationships with vendors and understand their contributions. Developer Analytics provides transparency on vendor performance, allowing team leads to establish the required relationships and secure outsourced investments.

Resource Management: Data-driven resource management is key to successful and timely project delivery. It provides an accurate overview of cross-organization resource distribution to help managers understand performance declines and identify underlying causes, such as incorrect resource allocation.

Capacity Planning: Without clear visibility across a team’s capacity, future planning can be unreliable. The ‘Sprint Retrospective’ objectively measures effort for each sprint to understand capacity for future resource allocation.

Alignment with Agile Practices: The platform aligns teams and projects with a company’s agile practices by using data to understand the drivers behind the productivity of tools, projects, processes, and people.

Who are BlueOptima?

We provide a SaaS technology that objectively measures software development efficiency. Our core metrics for productivity and code maintainability allow executives to make data-driven decisions related to talent optimization, vendor management, location strategy, and much more.

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