February 22, 2026
Measuring developer experience wrong is worse than not measuring at all. Lines of code, commit counts, and story points per sprint all create perverse incentives — developers game what gets measured. Good metrics measure outcomes (how fast does code reach production?) and perceptions (do developers feel productive?) without punishing individuals.
The goal is identifying systemic friction in tools, processes, and the platform. Never to evaluate individual developers.
February 22, 2026
You cannot improve what you do not measure. Most teams have detailed monitoring for their production applications but treat their CI/CD pipelines as black boxes. When builds are slow, flaky, or failing, the response is anecdotal – “builds feel slow lately” – rather than data-driven. Pipeline observability turns CI/CD from a cost center you tolerate into infrastructure you actively manage.
Total time from pipeline trigger to completion. Track this as a histogram, not an average, because averages hide bimodal distributions. A pipeline that takes 5 minutes for code-only changes and 25 minutes for dependency updates averages 15 minutes, which describes neither case accurately.