If the coronavirus taught us anything about business success, it is that open-mindedness can open up a new world of possibilities. But in the age of flexibility, some managers are still adamant about flexing their leadership muscles in the old-fashioned way.
And they are not entirely to blame. The command and control management practices carried over from the 1950s and ’60s are so deep-rooted in our psyche and have become such an interwoven part of the fabric of the organizational culture that it may take ages for the seeds of a new mindset to grow into a forest that can reshape the working landscape beyond recognition.
But we need to remind ourselves that every forest started as a seed and should celebrate our humble beginnings while warding off the scourge of complacency.
Waydev, a Git analytics platform for engineering productivity, is one of the pioneers of change in the software development industry who believes that out-of-date productivity metrics should no longer be used to evaluate developer performance.
Having embraced a vision to help reinvent the crucially important sector one company at a time, the San Francisco-based startup offers a solution that enables managers to track the output of their software engineers automatically without their manual input.
“In a nutshell, it’s like Google Analytics, but for software development,” says Alex Circei, CEO and co-founder at Waydev, which has been trusted by more than 300 companies.
Wasted opportunity
The company is acting upon industry data that indicates companies worldwide lose about $300 billion of developer productivity every year. This is while the nearly 20 million developers working in different parts of the world have the ability to collectively raise global GDP by $3 trillion in less than 10 years.
Founded in 2017, Waydev is tapping into this huge potential with a flexible architecture which allows for the integration of the Git platforms that the client is already using.
It analyzes the client’s codebase from GitHub, GitLab, Azure DevOps, and Bitbucket to help them become data-driven and make less subjective, more accurate decisions that leads to faster delivery of reliable software while ramping up engineering productivity.
Git is the backbone of the product developed by Waydev, which is defined as an open-source distributed version control system designed for tracking changes in source code during software development.
Mental health
In Circei’s view, Git analytics is redefining the present and future of engineering and will keep transforming how managers assess the work done by their team.
He says many managers keep asking engineers the same questions every day, which only takes the focus of both sides away from what really matters and often results in undesirable behaviors and outcomes.
And, amid the coronavirus pandemic, this could be an added cause of frustration for software developers who have a significantly higher chance of experiencing burnout, fatigue, stress, and anxiety, compared to their colleagues who perform mechanical tasks.
Recent surveys show that about half of software developers are working more hours than before COVID-induced lockdowns and that they are overall “very concerned” about their physical and mental health.
Waydev wants to make sure that engineers are being treated as humans and maintains that its solution helps minimize the pressure felt on developers so that they can produce a higher quality of code while improving talent retention.
The days of counting lines of code and capturing hours are becoming a distant memory, Circei said, adding that the future of remote engineering will be marked by fewer, but more productive hours spent working.
