Sleuth wants to use AI to measure developer productivity – TechCrunch

▤ Summary

“With the avalanche of remote work brought on by the pandemic the need for developers, managers and executives to understand and communicate about engineering efficiency has increased sharply,” Etkin told TechCrunch via email. While at Atlassian, which grew from 50 to over 5,000 employees in the time that Sleuth’s co-founders worked there, Etkin says it became “crystal clear” that many engineering teams lack a quantitative way of measuring efficiency — and that this gap could hold them back from growing and improving. “However, measuring efficiency has historically been very challenging for a multitude of reasons, namely tooling complexity, lack of access to data and use of dubious proxy metrics that bred micromanagement and distrust.” Sleuth’s solution is DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) metrics, an emerging standard used by developer teams to measure how long it takes to deploy code, the average time for a service to bounce back from failures and the how often a team’s fixes lead to issues post-deployment. As Sagar Bhujbal, VP of technology at Macmillan Learning, told InfoWorld: “Developer productivity should not be measured by the number of errors, delayed delivery or incidents. It causes unneeded angst with development teams that are always under pressure to deliver more capabilities faster and better.” Etkin agrees, emphasizing that engineering managers need to avoid the temptation to micromanage.

▦ Linked Companies

Sleuth

$1M to $5M