CIO Guidance for Addressing the Lack of Visibility in Software Development Teams

As the cost to deliver software required to support digital offerings grows, CIOs face pressure to defend investments in software development teams, something many struggle to do because they lack visibility into those teams performance. To help address that problem, this IDC Perspective provides direction to CIOs regarding organizational practices for measuring and monitoring their software development teams. IDC has found out that most technology decision makers are buying commercial software and customizing it and/or developing software internally to support key goals in digital innovation. These measuring/monitoring practices are especially helpful for those CIOs who are called upon to defend enterprise investment in software development. In this report, we suggest ways to show the relationship between business objectives and the key indicators of software development performance to make progress visible. Specifically, we identify the top challenges IT leaders are facing when it comes to monitoring and reporting on the performance of development teams; provide an overall structure in approaching the practice, toward the goal of demonstrating to the C-suite the relationship between a business objective or strategic initiative and the key indicators of the software development process that bring the objective into reality; discuss the tools that IT leaders are using to manage and optimize their development teams; and lay out precise productivity, business alignment, cost efficiency, and software quality measurements that can be used. "Long before the position of chief information officer was defined and IT deemed a strategic investment, software was relied upon to support mission-critical functions of the defense and intelligence communities. There was a lot riding on software success for those applications, and there is a lot riding on software success within digital transformation today. The leaders of mission-critical software development projects learned the best ways to monitor and measure team progress; CIOs can use the same proven indicators to defend investments today," says Cora Carmody, adjunct research advisor for IDC's IT Executive Programs (IEP).