Case Study: How Doutor Finanças Revamped Evaluation of Developer Performance in Jira Cloud
This case study outlines how Doutor Finanças streamlined performance evaluation of their development teams with our Employee Performance Ratings app.
About the customer
Doutor Finanças helps Portuguese families balance their finances and save money on regular or one-time payments. The company aims at promotion of financial lifehacks and extensive development of financial literacy of Portuguese people.
They facilitate financial education by posting training articles, financial simulators, and various courses on budget instruments. Our customer aims at letting the Portuguese become more independent and make more informed decisions about their family budgets and financial planning. In addition to education, our customer evaluates and reviews finances of their customers, analyzes their pains and goals, and elaborates solutions for income and expense optimization.
At the moment, Doutor Finanças has more than 100 financial advisors (doctors) that work on home loans, life and property insurance, automobile loans, and consolidated credits. Since the company foundation, they have helped about 50,000 families balance and optimize their finances, reduce expenses, and find financial solutions for their needs.
Case background
Doutor Finanças runs a platform for tracking incoming requests, collecting documents, and collaborating with their customers. The dedicated development team implements new features and works on reliability and optimization of this platform.
As the company is developing its financial advisory platform as a digital product, they greatly value the quality and user-friendliness that’s why the company heavily invests in making it simple and easy-to-use.
In addition, our customer contributes to the training and professional growth of the development team, as well as facilitates and refines approaches to writing high-quality program code. That’s so they needed a tool to evaluate how development processes are evolving over time and how development teams and their processes are improving.
Looking for potential solutions
Evaluation of developers’ performance is not an easy task as it may seem at once. A lot of factors affect the way it is assessed and the metrics that are used. When you are using a SMART or OKR approach for performance evaluation, it may be not so objective as the focus is on the final results and delivery time, while quality is out of focus. In addition, six-month performance reviews performed by HR teams cannot fully reveal all the potential problems that may exist in your development processes.
Our customer wanted to integrate performance evaluation into the existing development pipeline and make it an integral part of developers’ activities. They have reviewed a lot of articles and evaluated multiple approaches of how to assess performance of development teams and what metrics to use for this.
Having tried multiple methods and frameworks, our customer was quite dissatisfied with them. They did not help them reach the defined objectives. The resulting metrics were quite useless in revealing the actual problems and issues of their development teams.
After several attempts to find the solution for their needs, they came to the Atlassian Marketplace where found our Employee Performance Ratings app. Actually, it was not the solution they actually needed, but it was the closest one to their requirements.
Reshaping the solution and adjusting it to actual needs
The Employee Performance Ratings app is an extension for Jira Cloud that lets you assess completed issues against particular metrics, like speed, quality, or skills. Our customer was one of the early adopters of the app after its release in the Atlassian Marketplace.
Collaboration with them helped us identify the key scenarios for assessment of developers and existing gaps and flaws in the current user experience. In addition, our customer requested a better way to manage metrics and let several people evaluate developer’s performance on the same task.
Besides the available dashboard with metrics and their trendline, Doutor Finanças needed export of CSV data with ratings for their further evaluation per sprint in MS Excel.
Refined approaches to developer performance assessment
After integration of the Employee Performance Ratings app into the development pipeline, our customer is using a comprehensive approach to evaluate performance of developers in Jira Cloud.
At the moment, they assess every development task against the three metrics (criteria):
- first approval: this metric indicates whether the task was approved during the first review. If not, this will decrease the resulting score. It is used as an indicator of how well the requested functionality was implemented and how many corrections were required before it fulfilled all the acceptance criteria.
- story points: this metric indicates whether the developer is taking more complex tasks that take more story points or deals with small and simple tasks or bugs. It defines the developer’s contribution to the project development and the introduction of new features.
- code quality: this metric indicates the quality of the program code written by the developer and its correspondence to guidelines and code conventions.
Every development task is assessed against these three metrics. The developer’s progress is measured based on the sprint-to-sprint approach, so the project managers can see whether the developer improves over time or not and what activities can facilitate these improvements. So that they can elaborate on the adequate approaches to handle such situations. Progress by sprint is calculated in MS Excel on the basis of raw CSV data exported from the app.
Our customer does not leave the text feedback in the app itself, as they comment specific code snippets inline in Bitbucket, so they have no need to duplicate this information in our app.
Main benefits of developer performance assessment
The introduction of the Employee Performance Ratings app for assessment of completed tasks has improved the development processes and made the evaluation process simple and transparent to all. Project managers and team leads can now focus their attention on actual problems of their teams and address them pointwise, and developers receive continuous feedback on their work.
The app’s assessments are used for performance review and promotion of developers on a regular basis. For every evaluation period, the developer has a development plan which includes improvement of a specific metric from one value to another. So now developers are more eager to grow technically and look for more feedback on how they can progress.
Since the moment of integration of the Employee Performance Ratings app into the development pipeline, Doutor Finanças has noticed significant improvements in its development processes, increasing speed and quality of code delivery, and transformation of the performance review into a clear and transparent process for all parties.
