# Why Engineering Leaders Need Software Engineering Intelligence Platforms This post is part of our historical archive. It represents the beliefs, actions, products, and services of Code Climate as of its publication date. Today, Code Climate focuses on providing enterprise leaders the software development data, context layer, and playbooks needed to build the AI-native software organization their enterprise needs. Head to codeclimate.com to learn more. Both value stream management platforms and Software Engineering Intelligence (SEI) platforms offer critical insights, but SEI platforms cater to the needs of engineering leaders. May 8, 2023 7 min read # VSM vs. SEI Platforms: Why Engineering Leaders Need Software Intelligence Platforms Software organizations and teams power businesses across a range of industries, and the success of those organizations hinges on fast, stable, and predictable software delivery. For any organization wanting to gain an advantage in the marketplace and provide maximum value to customers, improving the efficiency and productivity of their engineering team is a critical step. With an abundance of tools, stakeholders, and data repositories, engineering organizations are complex. Not only is leadership tasked with optimizing the flow of work through delivery pipelines, but also with quantifying and demonstrating engineering value to the business. Many leaders turn to a [value stream management](/content/blog/what-is-value-stream-management/index.html) (VSM) tool or a Software Engineering Intelligence (SEI) platform, to address these challenges. While both have their benefits, there are important differences that make SEI platforms the most comprehensive solution for engineering leaders. Software Engineering Intelligence (SEI) platforms, also sometimes known as Engineering Management Platforms (EMPs), like Code Climate, offer critical insight into the engineering part of the value stream by providing both granular and holistic views of a team’s DevOps pipeline, team health, and developer experience. This enables engineering leaders with the right tools to be more effective in their roles. SEI platforms also surface [value stream metrics](/content/blog/what-is-value-stream-management/index.html), like those tied to product value and customer satisfaction, which allow leaders to communicate more effectively with stakeholders. ### **How does Code Climate provide value stream insights?** Code Climate's [Software Engineering Intelligence (SEI) platform](/content/blog/engineering-management-platform/index.html), offers a range of insights that are valuable for engineering leaders and teams, but when it comes to the value stream in particular, it allows teams to track efficiency, resource allocation, and speed of software delivery. For those looking for value stream insights, Code Climate's platform offers: **Data and integrations.** Code Climate's platform ingests data from an organization’s existing tools, including GitHub and Jira, plus incident and deploy data, turning that data into dashboards and reports. **Actionable insights from data.** Engineering leaders can leverage these insights to investigate their delivery pipelines and make improvements to the workflow. They can also share reports with stakeholders to underscore the impact of the engineering team on the business and align on strategic priorities. **Modules to enhance visibility.** With modules like Team360, Dev360, and Code Review, managers can evaluate processes and institute best practices to improve workflow. With metrics like [Cycle Time](/content/blog/software-engineering-cycle-time/index.html) and modules like Workstreams, Code Climate allows users to understand the flow of work through application delivery pipelines. **DORA metrics.** [DORA metrics](/content/blog/dora-metrics/index.html) track the overall efficiency of how you are delivering value to your customers. Code Climate captures the four key DORA metrics, contextualizing them among other engineering metrics, in our Analytics module. ### **Tracking deliverables within Code Climate's Platform** A key component of value stream management is the ability to track the status of projects and deliverables. Here are two ways that Velocity can help track deliverables: **With Workstreams:** Velocity’s Workstreams module brings together Git and project management data for active boards and sprints, allowing engineering leaders to visualize work in progress. To be more effective, engineering leaders need even more capabilities than what value stream platforms provide. Here are additional insights provided by an SEI platform like Velocity that are critical for leadership. ### **Benchmarking within Velocity** With competitive benchmarking available in an SEI platform, engineering leaders can compare their team’s performance against others in the industry. Internal benchmarking can also be useful for teams to evaluate their own progress, or to assess the efficacy of your internal onboarding processes. While we don’t recommend stack ranking developers, there are effective ways of comparing teams to achieve impact. Using the Compare module within Velocity allows leaders to identify high performers. You can then dig deeper into those teams’ processes, and scale best practices across the organization so that every team is operating at that level. ### **Tactical engineering metrics from an SEI platform** Leaders need ways to connect engineering input to business outcomes in order to demonstrate the engineering organization’s impact on the business. SEI platforms provide the level of visibility required for leaders to communicate the value of engineering teams to stakeholders. ### **Velocity contextualizes data** Code Climate’s SEI platform, Velocity, does more than provide metrics: it surfaces actionable insights and ingests up to a year of historical data, so that engineering leaders can identify trends and patterns. With annotations, Velocity users can add relevant context to data within the platform, noting events or organizational changes, and observe their impact. [Velocity’s Analytics module](/content/blog/dora-in-analytics/index.html) also allows engineering leaders and teams to view metrics in tandem to find correlations. ### **More than Delivery Metrics: Maximize Team Health with Velocity** Beyond focusing on work that moves through the pipeline, effective engineering leaders prioritize the health of teams and experiences of individual contributors. An SEI platform like Velocity makes it easier for engineering leaders to gain visibility into team health, while traditional VSM tools do not surface these insights. Creating [a culture of continuous feedback](/content/blog/culture-of-feedback-engineering/index.html) and encouraging developer growth, for example, all lead to a better working environment. A positive, psychologically safe environment leads to product innovation and a higher rate of developer retention, which in turn will lead to improved value delivery. While developer happiness is difficult to quantify, Velocity surfaces insights that correlate to developer satisfaction and team health, and helps leaders spot and prevent potential burnout, find opportunities for developer growth, and inform coaching conversations. Here are Velocity features that specifically address these needs: #### **Team360** Velocity’s Team360 module is designed to provide engineering leaders with a consolidated view of what their teams are working on. With snapshots and illustrations of workload and work distribution, leaders will be less inclined to ask for updates or [micromanage teams](/content/blog/stop-micromanaging-team/index.html). With this module, leaders can visualize how work is distributed to mitigate potential burnout, and see where teams are excelling to scale best practices across the organization. Engineering leaders can use these insights to inform coaching conversations, providing concrete analytics to help teams remove blockers and establish priorities. #### **Developer360** The Developer360 module, designed for Engineering Managers, provides transparency around engineering work and, similar to Team360, helps with coaching, alignment, and planning. Specific insights into developer activity helps managers identify at-risk work so you can step in and support developers, while a snapshot of developer workload offers transparency around a team’s capacity and work distribution. Additionally, managers can gain a visual summary of a developer’s technical toolbox and skill level, providing a basis for planning and coaching conversations. #### **Compare** Velocity’s Compare module is the engineering leader’s answer to identifying top performers and those who need additional support in an organization. This module breaks down performance by metric to visualize how individuals and teams are performing relative to one another on a given metric, as well as how performance is improving over time. Compare offers various visualization formats to gain different insights. For example, Radar View is a visual representation of whether a developer’s efforts are evenly distributed across all relevant metrics, whereas the Card View allows you to see metrics for teams or individuals in a scorecard format, and compare metrics over certain time periods. The role of engineering leader is multifaceted. In addition to overseeing and improving delivery pipelines, team health, and performance, leaders also need to communicate the impact of the engineering organization to stakeholders. A data-based platform is the most effective way to achieve this: data insights lay the groundwork for actionable conversations with your team to enable them to excel, while offering concrete evidence of the engineering’s role in driving change in the business. While VSM and SEI platforms both offer objective data, SEI platforms offer the most critical insights for engineering leaders. _To see Velocity’s capabilities in action,_ [_schedule a demo with a product specialist_](/content/cc/value-stream-management-demo?utm_campaign=CP_03-31-23_Value-Stream-Management-Signup&utm_source=Website%20Blog/index.html) _._ ## Why a Strategy Matters At the heart of every successful software engineering team is a drive for three things: 1. A culture of continuous improvement 2. The ability to move from idea to impact quickly, frequently, and with confidence 3. A software organization delivering meaningful value These goals sound simple enough, but in reality, achieving them requires more than just wishing for better performance. It takes data, action, and, most importantly, a cultural shift. And here's the catch: those three things don't come together by accident. In my experience, whenever a large-scale change fails, there's one common denominator: a lack of a cohesive strategy. Every time I’ve witnessed a failed attempt at implementing new technology or making a big shift, the missing piece was always that strategic foundation. Without a clear, aligned strategy, you're not just wasting resources—you’re creating frustration across the entire organization. ## Step 1: Define Your Purpose The first step in any successful engineering insights strategy is defining why you're doing this in the first place. If you're rolling out developer productivity metrics or an insights platform, you need to make sure there’s alignment on the purpose across the board. Too often, organizations dive into this journey without answering the crucial question: Why do we need this data? If you ask five different leaders in your organization, are you going to get five answers, or will they all point to the same objective? If you can’t answer this clearly, you risk chasing a vague, unhelpful path. One way I recommend approaching this is through the **"Five Whys"** technique. Ask why you're doing this, and then keep asking "why" until you get to the core of the problem. For example, if your initial answer is, _“We need engineering metrics,”_ ask why. The next answer might be, _“Because we're missing deliverables.”_ Keep going until you identify the true purpose behind the initiative. Understanding that purpose helps avoid unnecessary distractions and lets you focus on solving the real issue. ## Step 2: Understand Your People Once the purpose is clear, the next step is to think about who will be involved in this journey. You have to consider the following: 1. Who will be using the developer productivity tool/insights platform? 2. Are these hands-on developers or executives looking for high-level insights? 3. Who else in the organization might need access to the data, like finance or operations teams? It’s also crucial to account for organizational changes. Reorgs are common in the enterprise world, and as your organization evolves, so too must your insights platform. If the people responsible for the platform’s maintenance change, who will ensure the data remains relevant to the new structure? Too often, teams stop using insights platforms because the data no longer reflects the current state of the organization. You need to have the right people in place to ensure continuous alignment and relevance. ## Step 3: Define Your Process The next key component is process—a step that many organizations overlook. It's easy to say, "We have the data now," but then what happens? What do you expect people to do with the data once it’s available? And how do you track if those actions are leading to improvement? A common mistake I see is organizations focusing on metrics without a clear action plan. Instead of just looking at a metric like PR cycle times, the goal should be to first identify the problem you're trying to solve. If the problem is poor code quality, then improving the review cycle times might help, but only because it’s part of a larger process of improving quality, not just for the sake of improving the metric. It’s also essential to approach this with an experimentation mindset. For example, start by identifying an area for improvement, make a hypothesis about how to improve it, then test it and use engineering insights data to see if your hypothesis is correct. Starting with a metric and trying to manipulate it is a quick way to lose sight of your larger purpose. ## Step 4: Program and Rollout Strategy The next piece of the puzzle is your program and rollout strategy. It’s easy to roll out an engineering insights platform and expect people to just log in and start using it, but that’s not enough. You need to think about how you'll introduce this new tool to the various stakeholders across different teams and business units. The key here is to design a value loop within a smaller team or department first. Get a team to go through the full cycle of seeing the insights, taking action, and then quantifying the impact of that action. Once you've done this on a smaller scale, you can share success stories and roll it out more broadly across the organization. It’s not about whether people are logging into the platform—it’s about whether they’re driving meaningful change based on the insights. ## Step 5: Choose Your Platform Wisely And finally, we come to the platform itself. It’s the shiny object that many organizations focus on first, but as I’ve said before, it’s the last piece of the puzzle, not the first. Engineering insights platforms like Code Climate are powerful tools, but they can’t solve the problem of a poorly defined strategy. I’ve seen organizations spend months evaluating these platforms, only to realize they didn't even know what they needed. One company in the telecom industry realized that no available platform suited their needs, so they chose to build their own. The key takeaway here is that your platform should align with your strategy—not the other way around. You should understand your purpose, people, and process before you even begin evaluating platforms. ## Looking Ahead To build a successful engineering insights strategy, you need to go beyond just installing a tool. An insights platform can only work if it’s supported by a clear purpose, the right people, a well-defined process, and a program that rolls it out effectively. The combination of these elements will ensure that your insights platform isn’t just a dashboard—it becomes a powerful driver of change and improvement in your organization. Remember, a successful software engineering insights strategy isn’t just about the tool. It’s about building a culture of data-driven decision-making, fostering continuous improvement, and aligning all your teams toward achieving business outcomes. When you get that right, the value of engineering insights becomes clear.