Engineering Metrics CEOs Should Understand
Most CEOs do not know what to ask for when it comes to engineering metrics. The metrics engineers talk about, velocity, story points, sprint burndown, do not connect directly to business outcomes. And the metrics executives typically ask for, "how many features did we ship?", are too simplistic to reflect what is actually happening in the delivery system.
Here are the metrics that create genuine executive visibility into engineering health.
The DORA Metrics: The Industry Standard Foundation
The DORA (DevOps Research and Assessment) metrics are the most validated framework for measuring software delivery performance. They measure four things:
Deployment frequency. How often does the team deploy to production? High-performing teams deploy on demand or multiple times per day. Medium performers deploy weekly to monthly. Low performers deploy monthly or less.
Lead time for changes. How long does it take from code commit to production deployment? High performers achieve this in less than a day. Low performers take more than six months.
Change failure rate. What percentage of deployments cause incidents or require rollback? High performers see failure rates below 15 percent. Low performers see rates above 45 percent.
Time to restore service. When an incident occurs, how long does it take to restore service? High performers restore in under an hour. Low performers take more than a week.
These four metrics describe the reliability and speed of the delivery system without getting into engineering-specific details. They are appropriate for executive review.
Business Outcome Metrics
Beyond delivery performance, executives should track the connection between technology investment and business results:
Feature adoption rate. Of the features that ship, what percentage are actually used by the intended users at the intended volume? Low adoption suggests the team is building things that do not create value, a prioritization problem.
Incident impact on revenue or operations. What is the business cost of production incidents? This translates the technical metric of system reliability into business terms.
Time to market for priority initiatives. For the highest-priority business initiatives, how long does it take from decision to production? This measures the responsiveness of the engineering function to business needs.
Engineering Health Indicators
These metrics indicate the underlying health of the engineering system:
Test coverage in critical paths. Not overall coverage, which can be padded, but coverage in the code paths that handle the most important business functions. Low coverage in critical paths is a risk indicator.
Technical debt ratio. A rough measure of how much of engineering capacity is consumed by maintenance, bug fixing, and working around existing system limitations versus building new capability. A rising ratio indicates the system is becoming harder to change.
Open security vulnerabilities by severity. The count and age of known security vulnerabilities, segmented by severity level. This should trend downward. A persistent or growing count of high-severity vulnerabilities is a risk that belongs on the executive radar.
What Not to Measure
Story points or velocity. These measure team throughput within a sprint framework, not business value. They are easy to game and provide no insight into whether the team is working on the right things.
Lines of code. Irrelevant as a quality or productivity indicator. More code is not better.
Bug count. Raw bug count without context, severity, age, trend, is not a useful executive metric. The right metric is the rate of high-severity bugs in production and how long they take to resolve.
Establishing the Baseline
The most important step is not picking the right metrics, it is actually measuring them and establishing a baseline. Most engineering organizations in growing companies do not have the measurement infrastructure in place to report these metrics accurately.
A useful first engagement is an engineering assessment that establishes the baseline, identifies the most important gaps, and creates the reporting structure that will provide ongoing visibility.
Explore the Technology Assessments service or book a strategy call to establish engineering health visibility in your organization.