Perhaps your one-on-ones are a bit about career goals and skill development. Maybe you don’t quite know what to do with your one-on-one time. You might’ve started chipping away at setting goals for one-on-ones. Those goals might include building trust between you and your report, creating a safe place to discuss feedback and personal matters and provide recognition, reflecting on sprints, sorting out stretch assignments and planning, career development, or reflecting on the engineer’s happiness and their connectedness with the team and the organization, or even discussing product vision and direction.
One goal that engineering managers should have is creating a sense of clarity by reviewing individual historical contributions and mapping that to the impact on the team’s objectives and expectations.
Waydev is one of the Code Climate alternatives that helps engineering leaders create a sense of clarity by reviewing individual historical contributions and mapping them to the impact on the team’s objectives and expectations.
As you’ll see, the Developer Summary shows you a condensed view of an individual’s core metrics with trends and averages for an engineer’s metrics relative to those of their team. It includes a view of your engineer’s output, which is particularly useful to help you understand the shape of an engineer’s week or month across all work types.
You’ll get a stronger sense of how they perform in their code-level activities. Over time, this will help you visualize work patterns and progress over time, which can be useful information to drive conversations in one-on-ones.
The first visualizations in this report show the engineer’s core code fundamentals. You can also see summary stats, commit risk and a summary graph. If you scroll down, you will find a commits timeline, from which you can jump directly into your Git provider.
When viewing this report, we want to visualize data in context with the team’s trends and averages during that specified time period. In doing so, we’re less susceptible to being reductionist about a single data point and are instead looking to understand the broader trends and look for deviations from those trends.
Quick looks at the stability of their impact and efficiency relative to time periods when they are working on things they’re comfortable with will help us gauge the health of the transition and know when to stay out of the way or when to provide some assistance.
One of the toughest and most important responsibilities in engineering management is asking great questions and communicating the actionable answers. The Developer Summary is useful for triangulating different trends across an individual’s metrics to help inform your questions before going into a one-on-one.
It provides a unified view of how an engineer is working in a team and contributing to the code base. In your one-on-ones, pull up the Developer Summary and swivel your monitors so you and the team member can see it and help them get comfortable with the data and how it can be used to visualize work patterns and recognize their wins. Then, as your teammates get more comfortable with the data, you’ll likely begin to see a transition where the engineers will be coming to you with the data to tell their story better and to make more specific asks from you to enable them to do their best work.
By using the metrics from the Developer Summary, it’s now possible to have a more precise understanding of what’s going on before entering a one-on-one. As a leader, you should be thinking about people’s day to day and their year to year, helping them find a trajectory that matches their goals, while also having an explicit framework for how people can grow at your company. Then incorporating those best practices and finding coaching opportunities and your weekly one-on-ones will help individuals envision their future and how you can help them get there.
If you are looking for Code Climate alternatives that provide additional visibility into individual engineering activity, try Waydev for free.
