Software Engineering Dashboard Essentials: Designing for Impact and Efficiency

Today’s tech industry is fast-paced—everyone knows that.

That’s why software engineering teams need efficient tools to keep up with fast development cycles and competitive pressures.

Enter the software engineering dashboard.

A quality dashboard gives you real-time visibility into your team’s performance and highlights areas for improvement. 

If you leverage it correctly.

Luckily, you’re on the right page to learn to create and use a software engineering dashboard.

We cover: 

• Engineering dashboards’ key features 
• Benefits for various roles
• Examples of metrics to track
• Common challenges and solutions
• And more. 

Let’s dive in.

What Are Software Engineering Dashboards?

Software engineering dashboards are like control panels (or airplane cockpits) but for engineering teams. 

Their centralized view of key metrics helps product managers, engineering leaders, and development teams make data-driven decisions.

Engineering dashboards are also essential in the software development process because they offer real-time data and insights into various aspects of engineering projects.

The goal, of course, is to improve productivity and product quality. 

But to make the most of it, make sure your engineering dashboard has the following key features:

• Tech stack integration: The point is to consolidate data from different sources and get a comprehensive view. Conversely, you want to avoid rerunning scripts or performing manual data aggregation.
  
  
• Instant access to data: Make sure your dashboard gives you instant access to key engineering metrics. The point is to reduce delays, enable immediate action, and maintain high engineering productivity.
  
  
• Data visualization options: Quality engineering dashboards offer various data visualization options, including bar charts and other graphical representations. That way, you can understand complex data sets and analyze trends fast.
  
  
• Customizable notifications: This feature reduces the risk of overlooked problems that could impact your engineering process. So, set up notifications for bugs or issues.
  
  
• Easy sharing with stakeholders: Engineering dashboards make it simple to share insights and data with stakeholders, regardless of their access to the underlying technical data. Basically, engineering dashboards are communication tools that lead to better collaboration.
  
  
• Security features: Engineering dashboards should include robust authentication mechanisms, role-based access control, and data encryption. These security features protect sensitive information and maintain your project’s integrity.

Key Benefits of Engineering Dashboards

Engineering dashboards have many benefits for different roles within an engineering team. Let’s run through them to see what you can expect:

For engineering teams

• Improved productivity and efficiency: Engineering teams can monitor key metrics in real time, identifying bottlenecks quickly and taking immediate corrective actions, resulting in a sense of increased productivity and efficiency.
  
  
• Enhanced communication and collaboration: These dashboards improve communication between team members because they’re ideal for data sharing. Basically, they ensure everyone is on the same page.

For engineering managers and leaders

• Data-driven decision-making: You can instantly access data to make informed decisions on the spot. Even better, you can prioritize tasks that align with your business goals.
  
  
• Tracking key metrics: Engineering dashboards let you track quality-related metrics and other critical indicators. This allows you to gauge product performance and make swift improvements, which ultimately improves product usability and quality.

15 Essential Metrics for Engineering Dashboards

Engineering dashboards help you monitor and improve your engineering operations by giving you critical insights. 

But you can only get those insights by tracking essential metrics.

Here’s what we recommend you follow. 

• Cycle time: Cycle time is how long it takes to finish a task from start to end. It helps find slow points in development and makes everything faster. Shorter cycle times mean quicker updates and new features.
  
  
• Lead time: Lead time is the total time from a request to its completion, including wait time. It helps you spot delays and smooth out the workflow.
  
  
• Deployment frequency: This metric tracks how often code is deployed. High frequency means quicker updates and new features, showing how agile and responsive the team is.
  
  
• Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR): MTTR measures how fast a team can fix issues after they happen. Lower MTTR means the team can quickly minimize downtime and keep things running smoothly.
  
  
• Change failure rate: This variable shows the percentage of code deployments that cause problems. A lower error rate means better quality code and effective testing, keeping the software stable.
  
  
• Merge Request (MR) rate: The MR rate is the number of historical merge requests completed over time. It shows team productivity and highlights areas for better collaboration and code reviews.
  
  
• Code review time: This indicator tracks how long it takes to review and merge code changes. Fast reviews help maintain code quality and ensure timely feedback.
  
  
• Bug and issue metrics: These metrics track bugs and issues, such as the number of open bugs, bug age, and resolution rate. They help prioritize fixes and improve software stability.
  
  
• Throughput: Throughput measures how many tasks you complete in a specific time. It gives a big picture of team productivity and helps manage workloads.
  
  
• Load time: Load time measures how long it takes a system, app, or web page to become fully usable. Faster load times mean better user experience and performance.
  
  
• Collection of merge requests: This variable tracks the number of merge requests made, reviewed, and merged. Basically, it shows team productivity and the quality of the code review process.
  
  
• Improvements to product usability: Use this metric to measure changes made to improve user experience. Better usability increases user satisfaction and adoption rates.
  
  
• Developer Experience (DevEx): This evaluates how satisfied and engaged team members are. A positive experience leads to higher productivity and better talent retention.
  
  
• User analytics: User analytics track how users interact with the product. This helps identify areas for improvement and new features.
  
  
• Critical defects: This KPI tracks the number and severity of essential defects. Promptly monitoring and fixing these issues leads to better product reliability and user trust.

Pro tip: Work Type Classification at GitLab uses labels to categorize Issues and Merge Requests into three main types: Bug, Feature, and Maintenance. This classification improves reporting accuracy with subtype categorization, making it easier for analysts and leadership to understand the effort distribution. 

How to Design an Engineering Dashboard

Designing an engineering dashboard involves several key steps to ensure it meets the needs of your engineering team and stakeholders. 

Here’s our step-by-step process for creating a powerful and efficient dashboard:

1. Define your goals

Start by identifying the main objectives of your engineering dashboard. Determine what you want to achieve, whether improving team morale, skyrocketing engineering productivity, or obtaining better product quality. 

Clear goals will help you pick your dashboard’s best metrics and features.

2. Identify stakeholders

Understand who will be using the dashboard and what information they need. Your company’s stakeholders include product managers, development teams, and leadership. 

The point is to tailor the dashboard’s features and data visualizations to meet their needs.

Besides, it ensures that everyone can easily access the information that is most relevant to them.

3. Choose the right metrics

At Axify, we advise our clients to focus on centralized engineering metrics that provide valuable insights into their engineering process.

Pro tip: Many software solutions want to impress prospects through various metrics. However, adding non-essential metrics to your dashboard makes it more challenging to get the right insights.

Instead of crowding your dashboard with non-essentials, focus on: 

• DORA metrics: DORA metrics include deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, and MTTR. They measure speed and stability.
  
  
• Value stream mapping (VSM): This includes deliverable lead time, issue cycle time, and pull request cycle time. A VSM helps identify process bottlenecks.
  
  
• Forecast: Software delivery forecasting monitors delivery dates and completed issues, each with different confidence levels based on your project history.
  
  
• Objectives: This is where you can track your goals and key results (OKRs) to review progress and adapt your initiatives.
  
  
• Developer Experience (DevEx): Team morale is as important as other project-related metrics. A team that feels great works great. So, track the atmosphere to avoid burnout, lack of interest, and further productivity issues.

We’ll discuss these metrics more deeply in the section with dashboard examples because we want to highlight their practical role.

For now:

Remember: Axify gives you a full view of your software delivery performance, allowing you to improve your development and delivery processes. Book a demo now to see how it works.

4. Integrate data sources

Ensure that your dashboard integrates seamlessly with your tech stack. 

Axify.io supports integration with various tools and platforms, allowing you to consolidate data from different sources into a single view. 

We want you to have real-time data available for analysis and decision-making, so we made it easy:

5. Customize the layout

If you’re working with our friends at Jira or GitLab, design the layout of your dashboard to enhance usability and relevance. Use data visualization options such as bar charts and graphs to present information clearly. 

Customize notifications to alert users about critical events and make it easy to share insights with stakeholders.

6. Ensure security and access control

Implement robust security measures to protect sensitive data. 

Axify.io provides features like role-based access control and data encryption, ensuring only authorized users can access and manipulate the data.

Challenges and Solutions in Implementing Engineering Dashboards

Implementing engineering dashboards can be complex—if you’re not choosing the right platform.

Here are common roadblocks and our practical solutions to overcome them.

Challenge 1: Data biases

Problem: Data biases can skew the insights derived from engineering dashboards, leading to inaccurate conclusions. This can happen because of incomplete data, over-representing specific metrics, or subjective data entries.

Solution: Implement accuracy with subtype categorization to mitigate biases. By ensuring you categorize data correctly, Axify can provide more reliable insights. Besides, we’re using advanced analytics to improve your dashboard’s precision.

Challenge 2: Data integration

Problem: Integrating data from multiple sources can be tough, especially when dealing with disparate systems and data formats. The unfortunate result is incomplete or inconsistent data sets.

Solution: Axify offers seamless integration capabilities that support many data sources. We consolidate all relevant data into the dashboard to help you view your engineering activities comprehensively.

Challenge 3: Adding non-essential metrics

Problem: Including too many non-essential metrics can clutter the dashboard and dilute the focus on critical insights, making it difficult for users to find relevant information quickly.

Solution: Focus on key metrics that align with business goals and provide actionable insights. Axify dashboard displays only the most relevant data, such as speed, quality and stability-related metrics. We tailored it specifically for relevance according to scientific studies.

Challenge 4: Real-time accuracy

Problem: Ensuring the real-time accuracy of data is essential. However, delays in data updates or synchronization issues are genuine bottlenecks. That’s how outdated or inaccurate information is displayed on the dashboard.

Solution: Use Axify’s real-time data capabilities to ensure your dashboard displays the most current information. This includes leveraging features like instant access to data and real-time updates, which help you make timely decisions.

Challenge 5: Data security

Problem: Protecting sensitive data is a significant concern, especially when multiple stakeholders access the dashboard. Unauthorized access or data breaches can compromise the integrity of your data.

Solution: We already discussed this above, but security is paramount, so it’s worth another mention. Axify has robust security features, including incident management, rollback protocol, and data encryption. We make sure all your data is protected.

Engineering Dashboard Examples 

So far, we have explained how engineering dashboards are supposed to look theoretically. 

We described the metrics to track and issues to avoid, but it’s important to analyze practical examples to understand what to look for.

Engineering dashboard for engineering managers

The engineering dashboard displayed in the image below is tailored for engineering managers.

It provides a comprehensive overview of project workflows and key performance metrics.

Key metrics: The dashboard shows you metrics like delivery time, cycle time, and change lead time, with improvement percentages. The percentage changes provide insights into whether the team is improving or if there are areas that need attention.

Workflow stages: The dashboard tracks work items through various stages: To Do, In Progress, In Review, QA, and Completed. This provides a visual representation of the current status of tasks and their progress through the pipeline, allowing you to identify stages where tasks are getting delayed.

Detailed work item tracking: You can see a list of work items with their respective completion dates and detailed descriptions. This helps you sleuth out bottlenecks at specific stages. For instance, if items spend too much time in the “In Review” stage, you might need more reviewers or improved review processes.

Engineering dashboard for software engineering teams

Axify also has solutions for software engineering teams. For example, the dashboard below offers a detailed overview of the team’s workflow and productivity.

Let’s look at the benefits:

• Focus areas: The time investment summary shows where you spend the majority of time, helping teams and managers prioritize areas such as feature development or bug fixing based on current needs and strategic goals.
  
  
• Cycle time efficiency: Analyzing the cycle time summary lets you identify stages where items take longer than expected. For instance, a high percentage of time spent “To Deploy” suggests a need for streamlining the deployment process.
  
  
• Trend analysis: The bar charts for time investment and cycle time distribution show how the team’s focus and efficiency evolve. This data helps you make informed decisions about resource allocation and process improvements.
  
  
• Productivity monitoring: The throughput chart lets teams track the number of completed items per sprint. As such, you get clear insights into the team’s capacity and consistency. For example, a declining trend indicates potential issues you should tackle to maintain productivity.

Engineering dashboard for engineering leaders

We built the engineering dashboard designed for engineering leaders on Axify.io to align teams with the company’s vision and improve decision-making through comprehensive data insights. 

Here’s a detailed breakdown of its layout and actionable insights:

• DORA metrics dashboard: This dashboard displays the four key DORA metrics: deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, and time to restore service. These metrics help assess and improve the performance and stability of software delivery processes.

• Resource allocation overview: This provides a visual representation of how you distribute resources across various projects and tasks. It helps you discover areas where you might over- or underutilize resources.
• Software delivery forecasting: Uses historical data and AI to predict delivery dates, allowing leaders to plan projects more efficiently and address potential risks proactively.

• Value Stream Mapping: VSM breaks down the software development process into phases, highlighting inefficiencies and bottlenecks. This tool helps you optimize processes and prioritize activities generating the most value.

• OKRs dashboard: Objective tracking lets you monitor your progress toward objectives and key results. The point is to ensure alignment with company goals. This feature supports continuous improvement by making the impact of initiatives visible and holding team members accountable.
• Team health monitoring: Our team well-being section observes the five pillars of healthy teams: resilience, motivation, inclusion, safety, and alignment. This tracker helps leaders understand team morale and take action to improve productivity and job satisfaction.

• Daily updates: The Daily Digest section summarizes high-risk items and actionable tasks for the day. This feature optimizes daily meetings and keeps the team focused on current priorities.

Power Your Engineering Dashboard With Axify

Engineering dashboards are essential tools because they provide valuable insights into project progress, team performance, and operational efficiency. 

These dashboards empower teams to make informed decisions, identify bottlenecks, and continuously improve their processes. 

However, creating and maintaining an effective dashboard can take time due to issues like data integration, real-time accuracy, and including relevant metrics.

That’s where Axify comes in.

Axify makes creating and managing engineering dashboards easy. We help you tackle common challenges and offer features designed for engineering leaders, managers, and teams. 

Here’s how Axify can enhance your experience:

1. Comprehensive data integration: Axify connects with various tools and platforms, bringing all relevant data into one easy-to-use dashboard. No more manual data collection; enjoy real-time accuracy.
   
   
2. Immediate insights: Get instant access to live data, monitoring key metrics across your entire project. This helps you make quick decisions and fix issues before they grow.
   
   
3. Highly relevant dashboards: According to scientific studies, we picked the most appropriate metrics to display with Axify. Besides, you can select the right indicators for your team’s needs. Also, you don’t have to feed all the graphs manually—you simply have to choose the tool you want to integrate and you’ll see all the metrics from that tool.
   
   
4. Advanced metrics and reporting: Use advanced metrics, including DORA metrics and value stream mapping, to view your software delivery performance fully. Identify inefficiencies, optimize processes, and drive continuous improvement.
   
   
5. Enhanced security and access control: Features like role-based access control and data encryption keep your data secure and accessible only to authorized users.

Now that you understand the key features, benefits, and how to design an engineering dashboard, it’s time to put this knowledge into action. Start designing your engineering dashboard now and see the positive impact it can have on your team’s performance. Schedule a free strategy call today to learn how Axify can power your engineering dashboards and transform your software delivery.