Am I developing software effectively. Is it meeting customer needs and quality goals?

Modern software development is a heavily metrics-driven process. Agile software development rests on faster cycle times of smaller stories broken into sprints, in sharp contrast to the traditional waterfall process. Externally, dynamic market and customer requirements, rapid shifts in technologies, competitive pressures all lead to more pressure to deliver better, faster, cheaper.

Unfortunately, the systems used to manage the software development lifecycle haven’t always kept up with this change. Even the best dev shops have a smattering of systems – planning & tracking software, source version control, bug tracking, product usage logs. Pulling useful reports out of any of these systems is hard, analyzing the underlying issues that live across and between these systems is practically impossible.

GoodData makes reporting on the software development lifecycle easy. First, you are not limited by the canned reports delivered by any individual system. Every system spits out consistent logs and reports that can be easily loaded into GoodData. More important, GoodData helps analyze across these systems, making more meaningful reporting within your reach. GoodData helps answer these critical questions:

• Are your core development processes improving over time: stories completed per sprint, # of open bugs per month, developer utilization over time, etc.
• Which features – from which stories – took the most time to develop? To test? To deploy?
• Are there good or bad developers? Product managers? Testers? What separates the good from the bad? Does this change over time?
• How much time is spent developing a feature versus bug fixing it? Has that changed historically?
• Are the expensive-to-build features actually being used in the product?