How to avoid Common Issues in Data

For software engineers and software development companies such as DSV, data is incredibly important as it provides actionable, accurate feedback to help developers understand. Data is constantly generated, updated, and evaluated in today’s digital world.

From the product itself to its customers and markets, integration, and testing to deployment and runtime. Current software development is all about data. Various kinds of data help members of the development team get a full picture of the software that they are developing.

What exactly is Data-Driven Software Development?

Metrics provide powerful insight into how the business is successful, where its weakest links are, and allows each person to see how their individual efforts helped contribute to the overall project.

Data-driven development is a method used for development and service maintenance based on data. In addition to KPIs and OKRs, these metrics commonly include engineering metrics and positive behavior metrics.

The Common Issues

Taking a metrics-focused approach is incredibly beneficial for many organizations. However, there are a few common issues that occur when a company is not following key performance indicators and such, including:

• It is sometimes difficult for teams to stay motivated and engaged when their measuring metrics do not reflect the effort that they are putting into their software development work. Key performance indicators seem overwhelming when a team has an off month, quarter, individual project, or even year.
• Leadership must play a strong role in a data-driven development team as employees are sometimes intimidated by individual measurements. The development, creation, and deployment phases are sometimes a bit bulky.
• There must be a fair balance between the two types of metrics to both measure and reward successes while identifying problem areas. Organizations sometimes struggle with balancing individual KPIs and those of the team as a whole.

Tips for Successful Data-Driven Development

• Try to avoid “dirty data,” or data that contains inaccurate, duplicate, inconsistent, incomplete, or other incorrect data. Data management experts can help mitigate these issues by cleansing, validating, replacing, and deleting inaccurate information.
• Scale key results and experiment with them as necessary. OKRs are not static, unchanging metrics. After tracking for a quarter or after a few projects, these metrics should be reviewed and discussed with all team members.
• Data profiling and data exploration help those responsible for analyzing the data to investigate the quality and implications of use before it is established as a metric. The process of discovering data is obviously a fundamental and crucial task for this method of development to work.
• Larger organizations with major business divisions may subdivide, but everyone should be held accountable to the same level of measurement. Make the majority of key performance indicators an accounting function or rolled into the software product as a key management function.
• Software development organizations must take the time to find the right engineering metrics tool to track necessary metrics. Leadership must engage with their teams to help understand their work and how an effective tool can help their employees understand the results while getting more done. Software development teams should engage with the engineering metrics and suggest their own ways to use them.