At TeamMood, we’ve been advocating for team surveys for 10 years and we’re happy to see them being increasingly used.

Companies have relied on only system metrics (uptime, lines of code, etc…) for way too long, but more and more are adopting surveys to also have people metrics.

We wanted to highlight some quotes from an article we recently stumbled upon about team surveys. The interviewees were:

• Abi Noda is CEO and co-founder of DX, a platform for measuring and improving developer experience.
• Nicole Forsgren is a partner at Microsoft Research, where she leads the Developer Velocity Lab.
• Margaret-Anne Storey is Professor of Computer Science at University of Victoria in Canada, where she researches developer productivity.

You can’t measure people with system metrics

Abi Noda: Engineering leaders are inclined toward system metrics because they’re used to working with telemetry and log data. However, we cannot rely on this same approach for measuring people.

It’s faster to gather survey data than to implement system metrics

Nicole Forsgren: We can gather fast, accurate data with surveys: people can tell us about their work experience and systems much faster than we can typically instrument, test, and validate system data. And once we have that cleaned, validated system data, we should still be collecting some surveys, and the best companies do this.

Designing good surveys is hard

Margaret-Anne D. Storey: As Abi touched on, designing and running survey programs requires a lot of expertise and investment. We hear of many organizations that run into challenges with designing good surveys, or sustaining good participation rates.

System-based and people-based data are complimentary

Nicole Forsgren: I’ve long advocated the importance of using system-based and people-based data in complementary ways, and you can’t really improve software delivery or productivity if you fail to take a user-centric view of your system; in software engineering, your users are your developers.

While most frameworks about developer productivity are only about system metrics, these people have recently developed DevEx that is incorporating employee satisfaction and making it core to the framework.

If you’re curious, check out the links below for more information.

Going further

• A new way to measure developer productivity — Source of the interview
• Diving into engineering metrics — Article adding more information about the frameworks referenced in the link above

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• TeamMood increases feedback frequency. Get daily or weekly notifications to everyone in your team in just a few minutes after signing up.
• TeamMood is fun. The only thing your teammates need to do is click on their corresponding mood and they are done. Written comments are optional. It’s perfect to start getting more feedback. And it’s easy and quick enough to keep this habit in the long term.
• TeamMood is anonymous. Your teammates won’t be scared to give honest feedback because their identity is hidden.
• TeamMood helps you transform feedback into action. Our analytics dashboard help you monitor and analyze feedback to uncover actionable insights more easily.

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Header photo by Urban Vintage