How to measure the performance of Nearshore remote software engineering teams

Remote software engineering teams are a growing trend, but there's an essential question about quality: "How do you measure remote software engineering team performance?"

Why measure the performance of remote software engineering teams

Remote development is becoming increasingly popular. It's a cost-effective and efficient option that makes sense for specific teams. One of the reasons we might want to measure performance is to quantify whether implementing remote software engineering was worth it - and attribute successes and failures to the right decisions. The other reason might be so we can use this data to either modify or improve our service, efficiency, and design model.  Effective remote teams rely on critical foundation skills such as clear communication and agile working practices. Regularly measuring the skills and capabilities of the group provides an accurate and objective picture without placing too much weight on any one metric. The team scores will continuously improve as it develops its remote working capabilities and grows in size. However, we can still create a measure of progress by making a list of team and individual skills required to hit a predetermined score. We can review the current performance against that list at each review time. If it's complete, then the arrangement on an agile team will improve as the team matures and becomes more effective.

What metrics to measure for remote software engineering teams

How do I know if I am getting the full impact of productivity for my remote software engineering teams? Your organization may have different ways of defining performance. One metric for measuring the performance of your remote team is to find out about their average response time. This is typically how long it takes for them to reply to an email or phone call on a specific issue. Typically, response time is measured in hours and can be as short as one hour or as long as sixteen hours over a day. The response time varies on the issue's urgency, meaning that very urgent issues like alerting your team after a production bug will likely have a quicker response rate.   

Average response time = the Total number of issues analyzed. For example, if a team took 1.2 hours to reply on average, they had a response time of 1.2 hours on average.

Measuring team capacity load

We look at the number of issues in which a team is involved. By looking at a team's capacity load, we can measure how they deal with workload changes. A high capacity load indicates that the team is almost always dealing with work and cannot spread their workload equally. The other team indicator we will use is capacity predictors. We use these to determine how we can best shape work-loads based on a team's capacity. If we use capacity predictors, then we can accurately predict the additional work a team should be able to handle. Having said this, very small or large teams can be problematic. Their capacity will always be high for small teams, making volume less of an issue. The norm may need to continually advocate that too much work will be too small a team. At this point, we may need to add a member or two. A solution that can add top technical resources at a moment's notice using technologies that pre-screen and pre-qualify software engineering talent while giving your organization total transparency is Framework Science Nearshore Software Staff Augmentation service with a proprietary "remote team management system" called TeamStation. 

Conclusion

In conclusion, measuring the performance of software engineering teams adds a great level of success and efficiency to the company. Teams can see how they're performing individually and as a whole and know if there is anything that needs improvement before it becomes too dire. If you want to put your company at the top of its game, then you should start measuring remote software engineering team performance as soon as possible. Integrating with Framework Science's Remote Team Management System will give you and your organization optimal visibility, control, and management of your remote dev team from Mexico.