In today’s environment, software development excellence is becoming even more critical for business success. Over the past few months, we’ve seen organizations realize that their future success depends on taking advantage of technology to rethink business models, innovate, and improve processes to better serve employees and customers. The reality is many companies across different industries are becoming software companies. According to a recent study by McKinsey & Company: Developer Velocity: How software excellence fuels business performance, there are currently over 20 million software engineers worldwide, and over 50 percent of these developers are working at organizations outside of the tech industry.
The most successful organizations understand that transforming into software companies cannot be achieved solely through the introduction of new technologies; rather, it requires a deep focus on supporting the people who will catalyze change and create the new value they seek.
In this same study, McKinsey concluded that business leaders need to empower the people behind software development – the developers – to unlock their productivity and innovation, in what the industry has started referring to as Developer Velocity.
What is Developer Velocity?
Developer Velocity means driving business performance through software development by empowering developers, creating the right environment for them to innovate, and removing points of friction.
Developer Velocity isn’t just about increasing speed of software delivery but it’s also about unleashing developer ingenuity – turning developer teams’ ideas into software that supports the needs of your customers and the goals of your business.
Unleashing the potential and talent of developer teams, the day-to-day developer experience, and keeping software talent happy and motivated drive software success.
We often hear from software leaders that the set of potential levers to improve performance are so large and diverse – that it is often unclear how to prioritize or where to start.
To lead to a precise understanding of what it takes for a company to increase Developer Velocity, in this same study, McKinsey conducted a comprehensive review of software development practices included technology, working practices, and organizational enablement and converged on a single holistic metric – “Developer Velocity Index” or the DVI score. The Developer Velocity Index (DVI) score takes into account 46 different drivers across 13 capability areas (exhibit).
Some of the key striking findings from this study point out that companies with a higher Developer Velocity Index (DVI) score outperform revenue growth up to five times that of their competitors and they score 55 percent higher on innovation. Those organizations also surpass their peers on other key business performance indicators such as customer satisfaction, brand perception, and talent.
The study also concluded that from all the different drivers across the different dimensions, the top four drivers of Developer Velocity include best-in-class tools, product management capabilities, culture, and talent management. Lastly, beyond the foundations, public cloud adoption is a key driver of business performance for non-software companies, open source adoption is the biggest differentiator for top performers, and companies adopting low-code platforms score 33 percent higher on innovation.
Developers have always been true catalysts of digital transformation, innovation, and business performance. This data just validates how crucial it is for companies to invest in their development teams. To learn more about Developer Velocity study and get detailed findings and insights for retail, manufacturing and finance industries, watch this 5-episode webinar series: Improve Business Performance Through Developer Velocity.
How do I calculate the Developer Velocity Index Score (DVI) for my organization?
Last May we launched our Developer Velocity Assessment Tool. You can use this tool to discover where your organization is on the Developer Velocity maturity scale and benchmark your Developer Velocity Index (DVI) relative to your peers. Then, get actionable guidance for how to drive better business outcomes for your organization.
This online assessment takes 15-30 mins to complete and was built to help you and your organization identify gaps across three key domains: technology, working practices and organizational enablement. The assessment provides personalized reports showing a detailed outline for how your organization can improve over time to meet the growing needs of your developers and software strategy.
This week we shipped additional features into our assessment tool to allow our customers to get an even clearer view of their Developer Velocity Index (DVI) score. These additions include new charts, reports and a detailed breakdown of their DVI scores by category, sub-category, and individual metric level.
We are very excited to see how organizations take advantage of this assessment to help identify specific drivers that can help drive better business outcomes. Get started with the Developer Velocity Assessment tool to calculate the DVI score for your organization and learn how you can boost your business performance.
Scale your DevOps practices to increase Developer Velocity
Although many organizations are adopting DevOps, implementing effective practices at enterprise-scale can be difficult. At Microsoft Ignite, we are also excited the announce the new Enterprise DevOps Report 2020–2021, a Microsoft and Sogeti research study of more than 250 cloud and DevOps implementations. This report provides a comprehensive review on how to scale your DevOps practices to improve business metrics, customer satisfaction, and increase Developer Velocity – creating the right environment for developers to innovate. You can also use the study’s recommendations as a blueprint for your successful adoption of enterprise DevOps.
In this report, you’ll learn about:
• Six key areas of enterprise IT, including governance, that face significant challenges as part of an enterprise DevOps transformation.
• Common ideologies and patterns followed by top performing adopters to address the challenges of enterprise DevOps.
• Strategies implemented by successful enterprises to build continuous governance, security, quality, and compliance into their engineering processes.
• DevOps best practices to enable your organization to support distributed teams and remote work.
Empower your developer teams and boost your business performance
Developer Velocity helps you unleash the full potential of your developer teams, drive innovation, and boost business performance. Today more than ever investing in software excellence and building a culture that empowers developer teams will continue to be critical for every organization’s success.
Over the past few months we’ve seen many developers around the world building amazing customer applications and internal back to work solutions while working remotely. While things get back to normal, Microsoft is pleased to play a small part in supporting developers around the world and making remote development possible. To help developers build productively, collaborate securely, and scale innovation – no matter where they are – Microsoft offers the world’s most comprehensive developer toolkit with Visual Studio, GitHub, Microsoft Azure and Power Apps. It’s this set of capabilities that enables Developer Velocity within every organization. You can learn more about our latest innovation on Visual Studio, GitHub, Azure, and Power Apps shared at Microsoft Ignite. Also don’t miss our Microsoft Ignite keynotes where you can learn more about Developer Velocity and Microsoft’s most comprehensive developer toolkit and platform:
• Satya Nadella: Building digital resilience
• Julia White: Invent with Purpose on Azure
• Scott Hanselman: App Development in Azure
Azure. Invent with purpose.