Reflect on your 2024 year in code

Measuring developer productivity with Graphite

Sara Verdi
Sara Verdi
Graphite software engineer
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Eng teams need clear visibility into every step of the software development lifecycle (SDLC) to understand the bottlenecks preventing them from shipping faster. However, measuring developer productivity throughout this cycle has traditionally been challenging due to:

  • Inconsistent metrics across teams
  • Limited visibility into bottlenecks
  • Difficulty tracking improvement over time
  • Lack of actionable insights
  • Manual data collection overhead

These measurement gaps leave engineering leaders flying blind when making decisions about process improvements and resource allocation. Graphite’s Insights feature gives teams clear visibility across the SDLC, so they can quickly identify what’s slowing them down.

Graphite is far more than just a Software Engineering Intelligence platform. It features a comprehensive collection of tools—including stacked pull requests and the Graphite Reviewer, a PR inbox, and efficient merge queue—designed to streamline your software development workflow. Plus, with the data provided by Graphite Insights, teams can easily measure how these tools and practices boost their productivity and efficiency.

Graphite Insights tracks key productivity metrics that help teams identify bottlenecks and speed up code reviews:

  • Total PRs merged and average number of PRs merged per person
  • Average number of PRs reviewed per person
  • Median publish to merge time
  • Median review response time
  • Median wait time to first review
  • Average number of review cycles until merge
  • Graphs showing PR activity over time

Graphite Insights surfaces these metrics to developers in an intuitive, real-time dashboard. You can create, save, and share custom views of these metrics to focus on what matters to your team.

Graphite Insights enables engineering leaders to:

  • Identify process bottlenecks with precise metrics
  • Track the impact of workflow changes
  • Recognize high-performing practices
  • Support teams with targeted improvements
  • Demonstrate clear ROI on process changes

The platform's customizable reports and filtering make it easy to analyze specific teams, repositories, or time periods to measure the impact of specific changes and improvements.

Armed with data from Graphite Insights, teams can develop strategies to improve slow areas of the code review cycle, such as automating tedious processes or adjusting workflows to reduce waiting times between stages. They can then use Insights’s monthly reporting feature to regularly measure the impact of those changes and make data-driven improvements over time.

Understanding and improving your developers’ productivity doesn't have to be an imprecise science. With tools like Graphite Insights, engineering leaders can apply detailed, actionable data to refine their code review processes and ultimately help their teams ship higher-quality code faster.

Join leading engineering teams, like Shopify, Asana, and Ramp, in using Graphite to improve their productivity:

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