Technical Metrics to Track in Engineering Orgs

Good list. I agree with all of them except LOC tracking. What you’re trying to accomplish should instead be handled by having excellent tech leads who can with a bird eye view assess each developers impact. This could be done on a quarterly basis. I know thats kind of subjective but if you can’t trust your leads then the team is kinda already going to have problems.

Nobody is asking the real questions:

1. Is optimizing for (some of) these metric going to lead to business outcomes? E.g. Can someone give evidence that obsessing over LOC will lead to better business outcomes? And how?

2. For managers that utilize these metrics to compare and stack rank, how do they account for real business outcomes? E.g. if Tom writes a bug fix with 1000 loc and Jerry writes a difficult migration with a 100 lines of configs but with immense stress in production, how does management determine what is what?

Do you use any tools to track these metrics?