Join us for Swarmia Circle, a half-day virtual event for engineering leaders on March 27 →
Start free trialGet a demo
Log in

Practical ideas to help you build better software faster

Recommended reads

Otto Hilska

Measuring the productivity impact of AI coding tools: A practical guide for engineering leaders

Everyone’s excited about the potential of GenAI in software development, and for good reason. Tools like GitHub Copilot, Cursor.ai, and ChatGPT are changing how developers write code…
Read more→
Rebecca Murphey

The three pillars of effective software organizations

Call it what you want, but topics related to “ developer productivity ” and “ developer experience ” are at the top of many engineering leaders’ minds. That doesn’t mean the industry has…
Read more→
Miikka Holkeri

35 questions to ask in your developer experience surveys

“I inherited a developer experience team and was supposed to be in charge of understanding our development lifecycle and its pain points. I had no idea how to gather that information. I…
Read more→

Filter by topic

Rebecca Murphey · Mar 10, 2025

How does complexity affect developer productivity?

Software complexity has long been a topic of interest for engineering teams seeking to maintain productive, sustainable codebases. The problem is, both complexity and productivity have…
Read more→
Rebecca Murphey · Feb 24, 2025

Fast, good, cheap: With automated testing, you can pick all three

IBM made a fascinating discovery in the 1970s: products with the lowest defect counts consistently had the shortest development schedules. This finding suggested something transformative…
Read more→
Miikka Holkeri · Feb 17, 2025

How to run developer survey retrospectives in your team

“Our most recent survey closed quite a while ago, but I’ve yet to share the actions we’re taking based on it. We don’t want to send people the signal that they filled out the survey for…
Read more→
Rebecca Murphey · Feb 12, 2025

Improving developer productivity: Different levers at different levels

When software organizations start thinking about developer productivity, they often focus on individuals and teams — examining their processes, tooling, and ways of working. While team-level…
Read more→
Otto Hilska · Feb 6, 2025

Measuring the productivity impact of AI coding tools: A practical guide for engineering leaders

Everyone’s excited about the potential of GenAI in software development, and for good reason. Tools like GitHub Copilot, Cursor.ai, and ChatGPT are changing how developers write code…
Read more→
Rebecca Murphey · Jan 23, 2025

Understanding flow in software development: Economics, process, psychology

Flow is a rich concept in software development that encompasses multiple aspects of how work gets done. While we often discuss flow in terms of individual developer productivity or process…
Read more→
Rebecca Murphey · Jan 7, 2025

The three pillars of effective software organizations

Call it what you want, but topics related to “ developer productivity ” and “ developer experience ” are at the top of many engineering leaders’ minds. That doesn’t mean the industry has…
Read more→
Otto Hilska · Dec 17, 2024

Growing our product, customer base, and team — 2024 in review

In 2024, our efforts to build the most comprehensive software engineering intelligence platform continued to pay off as we welcomed a record number of modern engineering organizations as…
Read more→
Miikka Holkeri · Oct 25, 2024

Complementing engineering metrics with developer experience surveys

Seeing engineering productivity data for the first time can be an eye-opening experience. You notice a high pull request cycle time, dig deeper into its components, and see that reviews are…
Read more→
Rebecca Murphey · Oct 8, 2024

Introducing software engineering metrics to your organization

There’s increasing demand — from both senior engineering leaders and non-technical executives — to take some objective measurement of software engineering processes. Choosing the right…
Read more→
Rebecca Murphey · Aug 8, 2024

Engineering benchmarks: A guide to reducing change lead time

Change lead time or lead time for changes — the time between when a task is started and when the resulting code is in production — is one of the fundamental indicators of team health. When the…
Read more→
Rebecca Murphey · Jun 14, 2024

Engineering benchmarks: A guide to improving time to deploy

When you’re trying to improve the effectiveness of your software engineering organization, a handful of metrics can help you identify specific opportunities. One of those metrics is time to…
Read more→
Miikka Holkeri · Jun 5, 2024

35 questions to ask in your developer experience surveys

“I inherited a developer experience team and was supposed to be in charge of understanding our development lifecycle and its pain points. I had no idea how to gather that information. I…
Read more→
Otto Hilska · May 29, 2024

Structuring engineering organizations

Have you ever worked for a new startup with just a couple of developers? It’s pretty amazing, for a while. You know everything about the business domain. You know the whole codebase because…
Read more→
Rebecca Murphey · May 24, 2024

Engineering benchmarks: A guide to improving flow efficiency

When you’re trying to improve the effectiveness of your software engineering organization, a handful of metrics can help you identify specific opportunities. One of those metrics is flow…
Read more→
Rebecca Murphey · Mar 15, 2024

Sensible benchmarks for evaluating the effectiveness of your engineering organization

If you’re digging into engineering metrics for the first time, it can be hard to know what “good” looks like. The urge is strong to find a way to compare yourself to other companies using…
Read more→
Miikka Holkeri · Feb 20, 2024

Minimizing noise and bias in developer surveys

“The world is full of well-meaning people who believe that anyone who can write plain English and has a modicum of common sense can produce a good questionnaire.” — A. N. Oppenheim…
Read more→
Rebecca Murphey · Feb 14, 2024

Identify and eliminate common productivity bottlenecks for engineering teams

If you’re an engineering manager and you haven’t been asked lately about your team’s productivity, consider yourself lucky: optimizing the value created by an engineering organization seems to…
Read more→
Jarno Rantanen · Jan 3, 2024

What good Continuous Integration (CI) looks like

Continuous Integration (CI) is the process of integrating work from multiple developers, and assuring its quality automatically. It’s an integral component of any modern development effort, as…
Read more→
Otto Hilska · Dec 20, 2023

Welcoming a record number of new customers and a slew of key features — our year in review

2023 was a year of change and growth for us as we set our sights on supporting more leadership use cases, grew the team with several key hires, and introduced a slew of new features to the…
Read more→
Rebecca Murphey · Dec 4, 2023

Gaining visibility and control over cross-team initiatives

Once a software engineering organization has a few teams, engineering leaders are called upon to manage projects that span those teams. It’s not just about keeping tabs on what each team is up…
Read more→
Rebecca Murphey · Oct 30, 2023

Reduce interruptions to help engineers stay in flow

Interruptions — anything that yanks a developer out of that elusive “flow” state — can appear out of nowhere. They’re often untracked and underestimated in their ability to derail focus and…
Read more→
Rebecca Murphey · Oct 16, 2023

Engineering leaders share their wins and challenges in evaluating team performance

Earlier this year, Swarmia and LeadDev partnered with a research firm to understand the metrics that software engineering teams rely on and the bottlenecks they are struggling with. The work…
Read more→
Rebecca Murphey · Sep 21, 2023

Paper cuts and bad days: Improving developer experience by listening to engineers

Before joining Swarmia, I worked at Stripe for two years in its developer productivity organization. The single most interesting thing I got to work on was the engineering effectiveness…
Read more→
Ari-Pekka Koponen · Aug 29, 2023

Should you track DORA metrics for mobile apps?

Within the last few years, using the four key DORA metrics has become one of the most popular ways of tracking software delivery performance. As always, trends and popularity don’t come…
Read more→
Rebecca Murphey · Aug 9, 2023

BRAINS: A roadmap toward a more effective engineering organization

There’s plenty of content out there on what we’re coming around to calling “engineering effectiveness,” the work of ensuring that an engineering organization is delivering on business outcomes…
Read more→
Rebecca Murphey · Jul 7, 2023

When to start a platform team? Probably sometime around now

Once you have more than a couple of teams, you already have an internal developer platform , whether you know it or not. It exists as bash scripts, troubleshooting docs, the three slightly…
Read more→
Hugo Kiiski · Jun 8, 2023

Building software the Swarmia way

At Swarmia, we get to see hundreds of different development workflows from our customers, and have greatly enjoyed learning from them. We felt that it would be appropriate for us to return the…
Read more→
Rebecca Murphey · May 15, 2023

More than surveys: Capturing real-time data about developer experience

When you’re working on improving developer experience , one of the most challenging parts of the job is to prove that the work you’re doing is the right work, and that it’s having a real…
Read more→
Rebecca Murphey · Apr 12, 2023

Making the case for investing in developer experience

If you’re a savvy engineer or engineering manager at a company with a growing team (or just a growing codebase), chances are that you’re already part of conversations happening about the…
Read more→
Rebecca Murphey · Mar 16, 2023

Talking to your engineering team about improving productivity

If there’s one thing I’ve taken away from my time as an engineering manager, and later as a product manager, it’s this: Talking about difficult topics is scary, and generally also actually the…
Read more→
Hugo Kiiski · Mar 15, 2023

Bringing visibility into a developer’s work in a healthy way

Insights on an individual developer can be a scary topic. As developers, we’re often understandably allergic to the thought of our work being watched and evaluated. However, we probably also…
Read more→
Rebecca Murphey · Mar 7, 2023

Beyond spreadsheets: Driving developer productivity improvements using goals, signals, and metrics

So many developer productivity journeys start with a spreadsheet. Quickly or eventually, that spreadsheet evolves into a tool for tracking metrics across teams. Next thing you know, you’re…
Read more→
Ari-Pekka Koponen · Feb 28, 2023

The ultimate guide to developer experience

Understanding developer experience is vital when you want to improve the work engagement and productivity of the developers within your engineering organization. We'll cover what developer…
Read more→
Rebecca Murphey · Feb 13, 2023

Size, age, culture: 3 factors that will shape your productivity path

I’ve spent my first few weeks at Swarmia listening in on a lot of customer calls, and talking to many other software companies myself. It’s been a good reminder that every company’s…
Read more→
Mandy Dye · Jan 23, 2023

Practical advice for driving continuous improvement in software teams

As a Customer Success Manager here at Swarmia, I get to work with engineering organizations from some of the most impressive technology companies in the world. And over time, I’ve noticed…
Read more→
Otto Hilska · Dec 28, 2022

5x the customers and 38 new features — our year in review

At Swarmia, we’re all about helping modern engineering teams build great products, start better conversations, and create a culture of continuous improvement. And since 2022 was a year full of…
Read more→
Oskari Virtaoja · Dec 16, 2022

Swarmia is now SOC 2 Type 2 compliant

Ever since Swarmia was founded in November 2019, protecting our customers’ data has been a priority for us. After all, there’s no way we would be able to work with modern engineering…
Read more→
Hugo Kiiski · Dec 8, 2022

How we use Swarmia at Swarmia

When looking at a product like Swarmia, it can be hard to see how to put the theory into practice. In this blog post, I'll share how we use Swarmia to make our engineering team work better…
Read more→
Otto Hilska · Nov 30, 2022

How to make time for improving software development productivity

An engineering leader recently told me: “ I'd love to start improving our ways of working, but we need to ship a couple of features by the end of the year. ” While it would be tempting to…
Read more→
Eemeli Kantola · Oct 12, 2022

Managing complex business logic in SQL using Common Table Expressions (CTEs)

Let’s say you have a data-intensive app with a bunch of complicated querying needs. As things progress and your needs expand, the data access code might start getting more or less…
Read more→
Mika Vakula · Sep 15, 2022

Are daily stand-ups a waste of time?

If your daily stand-ups feel like a waste of time, they probably are. Here’s what’s wrong with most stand-ups — and what you can do about it. Here’s what’s wrong with daily stand-ups It…
Read more→
Eero Kettunen · Aug 31, 2022

Why cycle time is a better metric than velocity

Cycle time and velocity are both commonly used to measure and improve software teams’ ability to estimate how long it will take for them to complete a piece of work. While both metrics have…
Read more→
Ari-Pekka Koponen · Jul 28, 2022

Your organization’s guide to the SPACE framework

We’ve helped hundreds of organizations build a more complete picture of development productivity. This guide on the SPACE framework of developer productivity explains the framework, what we’ve…
Read more→
Hugo Kiiski · Jul 14, 2022

Creating the best GitHub experience on Slack

When we started building Swarmia, we found a surprising lack of Slack tooling for GitHub, the biggest developer platform out there. Why weren’t there good Slack notifications and interactions…
Read more→
Otto Hilska · Jun 21, 2022

You don’t need a Git analytics tool

I have a confession to make: I used to be a customer of an early Git analytics vendor. But I’d be lying if I told you that there were no warning signs. In fact, before I bought the tool, their…
Read more→
Ari-Pekka Koponen · Jun 9, 2022

DORA change failure rate – what, why, and how

Out of all the four DORA metrics, change failure rate is the one causing the most headache to engineering organizations. At Swarmia, we’ve spent quite a bit of time making sure we get it right…
Read more→
Kimmo Brunfeldt · Jun 3, 2022

Debugging Apollo GraphQL MockedProvider

We’re big on Apollo GraphQL here at Swarmia, but we’ve sometimes struggled with mocking. And based on these comments, it looks like we’re not alone . This blog post is here to help! Why…
Read more→
Lauri Ikonen · May 25, 2022

How to balance engineering investments — and not just keep the lights on?

One of the inescapable problems in software engineering has to do with balance. How do you balance the scales between new investments and keeping the existing software functional; how do you…
Read more→
Ari-Pekka Koponen · May 5, 2022

Why small pull requests are better

As a software engineer, I find myself creating large pull requests because it’s easy. Writing smaller pull requests takes practice. It also requires more of the boring planning part before I…
Read more→
Ari-Pekka Koponen · Apr 13, 2022

How your software engineering team can ship 10x faster

At Swarmia, we use the tagline "ship 10x faster.” To many, that sounds like an audacious claim. This blog post is the long footnote behind the asterisk ( * ) on that tagline. When we talk…
Read more→
Eero Kettunen · Mar 16, 2022

Why investors should care about product development performance

When you’re considering investing in an early stage software startup, it’s difficult to predict its future performance — especially if the market is already full of more established…
Read more→
Otto Hilska · Mar 9, 2022

Practical guide to DORA metrics

Ever since the book Accelerate was published in 2018, it’s been borderline impossible to have a conversation about measuring software development performance without any reference to the four…
Read more→
Ari-Pekka Koponen · Jan 5, 2022

How software engineers can learn at work

We know from multiple studies (e.g., 1 , 2 , 3 ) that learning at work improves both job satisfaction and organizational commitment. Both of these contribute to higher productivity and…
Read more→
Otto Hilska · Dec 30, 2021

Triple the teammates and 49 new features — our year in review

At Swarmia, we’re all about helping engineering teams ship better software faster by focusing on fewer things at a time. And our team is no exception. According to the story insights on…
Read more→
Eero Kettunen · Dec 21, 2021

Tackling typical problems with issue cycle time

The unfortunate reality about software development is that if you keep doing what you’ve been doing, you’ll start slowing down. When you first start building a product with a small team…
Read more→
Otto Hilska · Dec 16, 2021

Fixing the coffee situation at the office with lean and queuing theory

Coffee is an important ingredient in creating successful software development organizations. In this blog post, we explain how to to apply lean processes and queuing theory to brew enough…
Read more→
Ari-Pekka Koponen · Dec 8, 2021

The essential guide to agile team working agreements

Software development teams use working agreements to align their ways of working and improve collaboration. In this guide, we'll cover what working agreements are, why your team should…
Read more→
Lauri Ikonen · Nov 24, 2021

Why product teams should plan together — and how we do it at Swarmia

Planning is one of the skills that separates great product teams from the good ones. Teams that plan well are more likely to release in small and steady increments, build high-quality products…
Read more→
Oskari Virtaoja · Nov 11, 2021

Swarmia is now SOC 2 compliant

Update (Dec 15, 2022): Swarmia is now officially SOC 2 Type 2 compliant . Ever since Swarmia was founded in October 2019, data security has been in our DNA. In fact, we performed our first…
Read more→
Otto Hilska · Nov 9, 2021

Measuring software development productivity

The software world gave up too soon on measuring development productivity, deeming it impossible. A few years ago a new wave of research arrived that proved otherwise. After discussing the…
Read more→
Ari-Pekka Koponen · Oct 27, 2021

Reduce bias in retrospectives with better data

Many software organizations run retrospectives based on mostly subjective data collected from the retrospective participants. Studies show this leads to skewed insights that often miss broader…
Read more→
Kimmo Brunfeldt · Oct 12, 2021

A complete guide to code reviews

Code reviews are a widely accepted best practice for software development teams. In this post, we'll cover why the most successful teams use code reviews, how to adopt them in your development…
Read more→
Ari-Pekka Koponen · Oct 5, 2021

Well-researched advice on software team productivity

Understanding how individual people and productive teams behave is crucial for improving team performance. Often, it can be hard to distinguish ideological advice from insights grounded in…
Read more→
A 10x engineer at work in Chernobyl. The Hollywood Archive / Avalon
Ari-Pekka Koponen · Sep 21, 2021

Busting the 10x software engineer myth

Leaders often feel proud of their high performers. In reality, having "10x engineers" in your software organization may be a sign of an organization that is set out to fail in the long run. As…
Read more→
Otto Hilska · Mar 22, 2021

Hello World

What's needed to build a world-class product development organization? The common wisdom is to start with hiring the right people and empowering them. However, the often-forgotten part of the…
Read more→
Read or buy our book
Build: Elements of an Effective Software Organization is a blueprint for engineering leaders who want to improve their business outcomes, developer productivity, and developer experience.
Learn more→
Build book cover