Engineering analytics solutions provide a view of team activities, collaboration, and potential issues. Equipped with this data, you can guide your teams and ensure you're on the right path.

This article will cover engineering analytics, what to look for in an engineering analytics tool, and our top picks. Let's dive right in.

Table of Contents

• What Is Engineering Analytics?

• What to Look for in an Engineering Analytics Solution

• Top 5 Engineering Analytics Solutions

• How to Improve Your Software Engineering Metrics

What Is Engineering Analytics?

Engineering analytics is the practice of gathering, processing, and analyzing data created by engineering and development tools to acquire a better knowledge of the software development process. It entails employing various data-driven strategies to extract insights and generate meaningful suggestions. Engineering analytics' major purpose is to improve the software development lifecycle, improve product quality, and expedite decision-making. [1]

With software engineering analytics, you get a top-level view of how things are progressing with your software projects. But to collect accurate data on your engineering processes, you need software engineering analytics tools. A software development analytics tool, (sometimes referred to as a software engineering intelligence platform), tracks your team's progress during the development lifecycle. These platforms analyze the time spent on coding, bug reports, and business processes. Leaders can then study [2] these insights to optimize development and prevent workflow issues.

These tools correlate data between Git providers and project management tools to help you make decisions. They'll also highlight important trends, data, and key performance indicators. And finally, engineering analytics solutions help centralize teams' past progress in one spot. They provide reports by iteration or quarter, so you can evaluate where things stand and what you need to do to move forward.

What to Look for in an Engineering Analytics Solution

If you're already in the eye of the storm, you need a tool that can help you take your teams to softer seas. To help you get there faster, we've rounded up three must-have features you should look for in a software engineering analytics tool:

1. Key metrics: If you really want to gain actionable insights into your teams' work, your engineering analytics tool should focus on the right metrics.

2. User-friendliness: Your engineering analytics tool should make your life easier, not harder. Ensure you choose a tool that's easy to use and intuitive, so you can actually understand the data it gives you.

3. Visibility into roadblocks: The tool you choose should give you insight into current and potential obstacles so you can help clear them and get your teams back on track.

Additional Essential Features:

All engineering management platforms will provide insights into developer performance, but not all analytics solutions are created equal. Before you buy, check that your tool of choice comes with these essential [3] capabilities:

• Out-of-the-box integrations: Software development analytics tools are only as useful as the data they ingest. Examine your tech stack and find a tool that integrates seamlessly with as many tools as possible. If you need to integrate with legacy systems, discover whether you or the platform can build a custom integration. Prioritize reducing technical debt and keep custom integrations to a minimum. [4]

• Outcome-based metrics: Many tools give insight into output-based metrics, but the magic happens when output and outcome-based metrics are visible on the same dashboards. For instance, outcome-based metrics like Net Promoter Scores can relate to output metrics like number of features completed in a sprint cycle. [4]

Pro Tip: Choose a tool that will show you outcome-based metrics. That's how you see where your teams are struggling and make an impact.

Top 5 Engineering Analytics Solutions

Our top five engineering analytics tools offer good metrics, are user-friendly, and give you visibility into roadblocks. With the help of these tools, you can navigate your teams from port to port safely.

1. Weave

Leading our list, Weave revolutionizes how engineering teams size work by using AI to objectively measure engineering contributions. Weave combines LLMs and domain-specific machine learning to understand engineering work. [5]

What makes Weave special:

• Objectively quantifies every PR and tells you how long it would take an expert engineer to complete it - serving as a direct replacement for subjective story points

• AI Insights show the impact that AI tools have on your team's process and productivity

• Individual Reports provide specific insights for individual contributors to improve, like "Whoop for software engineers"

• Code Review Quality uses AI to scan every review and quantify its depth, pragmatism, and quality

• Cross-Team Visibility & Comparison offers insights into how different teams perform for easy comparison

According to Weave's approach, instead of asking "How fast can we deploy?", the better question is "How much are we getting done?" This focus on objective output measurement helps teams move beyond traditional estimation games and focus on actual value delivery.

Engineering leaders are using this to easily justify the spend for using AI editors. Teams are using this to figure out what's working well and repeat best practices. [5]

2. SonarQube

Available for free, SonarQube inspects several parts of your software to find bugs and ensure your teams consistently deliver clean code. It also:

• Allows you to monitor your teams' day-to-day progress with multiple dashboards

• Informs you of changes to libraries, packages, and the data warehouse that may introduce security vulnerabilities

• Has fail pipelines to prevent problems from being deployed

SonarQube is a self-managed open-source platform that helps developers create code devoid of quality and vulnerability issues. [6] With its focus on code quality, SonarQube helps guide development teams and safeguards your products against security vulnerabilities that otherwise might slip through the cracks.

3. Hatica

Engineering Analytics to boost developer productivity -- Hatica equips engineering teams with work visibility dashboards, actionable insights, and effective workflows to drive team productivity [6]

Hatica's key capabilities:

• Consolidates information from Git, projects, and collaborations, so you have visibility into your teams' development processes

• Features metrics for gauging DevOps performance like lead time, change failure rate, deployment frequency, and mean time to recover

• Integrates with Git and CI/CD systems, so you can view all your project's activities and data analytics in one convenient location

Hatica gives you a comprehensive view of what your teams are working on so you can base your business decisions on a full, accurate picture.

4. Flow

Flow builds healthier teams by giving managers the tools to optimize their processes. Specifically, Flow tracks DORA analytics, software development KPIs, and investment insights from workflows. With this data displayed on one centralized dashboard, team managers can measure progress, refine processes, and reduce friction between engineers. [2]

Flow's standout features:

• Flow doesn't only strive to track data, though—it helps you apply that data with actionable insights. Managers can use Flow for their teams' professional development and empower them to deliver higher-quality products. Our reports and workflow analysis give tips to reduce delivery time and wasted effort. [2]

• Team-level ticket filters and Git tags for streamlined data collection

• Professional development tools to help your engineering teams grow

From onboarding to managing remote teams and Agile transformations, Flow positions itself as your one-stop shop for engineering success.

5. Plandek

Plandek is an intelligent analytics platform to enable technology teams to deliver quality software, faster and more predictably. Plandek enables technology teams to track and drive their improvemen. Plandek is an intelligent analytics platform to enable technology teams to deliver quality software, faster and more predictably. [6]

Plandek's benefits:

• Seamlessly integrates with applications, extensions, and services, making it ideal for automating engineering processes

• Gathers data from previous software development cycles to help you make business decisions going forward

• Helps you discover and eliminate roadblocks to minimizing delays and keep tabs on project goals

With Plandek, you'll be able to keep your org lean and effective with data-driven insights into your teams' work patterns and progress over time.

How to Improve Your Software Engineering Metrics

Engineering analytics solutions can be your lighthouse. They can give you key insights into what your teams are working on and how the work is going. With this data, you'll be equipped to clear out bottlenecks and make the best business decisions for your org.

But metrics alone don't improve dev teams.

The Challenge with Traditional Metrics

Output metrics like story points logged, or tickets closed alone offer little insight into overall project success or team happiness. Without direct input from developers, product owners and the C-Suite are blind to the bottlenecks holding them back. [3]

For years, organizations have struggled to quantify developer performance, turning to incomplete metrics like number of commits or points per sprint. Now, 70% of teams are actively forgoing measuring lines of code, revealing an increased concern that this and similar metrics lack critical context, overemphasize output, and are too easily gamed or manipulated. [4]

The SPACE Metrics Problem

While SPACE metrics have gained attention in the engineering community, they present significant implementation challenges. According to Weave's research, SPACE metrics are expensive to calculate for teams and don't lead to implementation success. This makes them impractical for many engineering organizations seeking actionable insights quickly.

A Better Approach with AI-Powered Analytics

Weave helps you leverage powerful data to visualize your processes and know where and how you need to improve. This will help you boost your overall engineering efficiency and productivity. Weave also allows you to compare yourself to other elite orgs, so you can continue competing with the best of the best.

Plus, with objective work quantification and AI-powered insights, you can set goals for your teams to achieve based on actual output rather than subjective estimates. This approach automates loads of manual tasks while providing alerts when teams are nearing or have crossed customizable thresholds to keep you on track with your goals.

The Future of Engineering Analytics

SEI platform adoption is projected to rise significantly, from 5% in 2024 to 50% by 2027, as organizations seek to leverage data for increased productivity and value delivery. SEI platforms provide data-driven visibility into engineering teams' use of time and resources, operational effectiveness, and progress on deliverables. They integrate data from common engineering tools and systems, offering tailored, role-specific user experiences. [7]

Whether it's increased efficiency, productivity, or return on investment (ROI) you're after, you can achieve, and even exceed, your business goals by putting engineering analytics tools like Weave to work in your data pipeline.