Why DevRel should care about Software Development metrics

In general terms, marketing mission within Developer Relations is to show how attractive a specific software project is and get developers motivated and engaged. However, how can a DevRel prove to the company that the investment is worthwhile? How can we show the real value that comes from their teams? Are marketing tools providing enough data? Software development analytics is the next step to answer these questions.

DevRel actions are made for a specific goal: Get more and more developers to either use or contribute to a specific project. Forums, site documentation, GitHub... There are several touch-points where developer community interact with the project before and while using it. Thus, being able to get evidence about the activity of these data sources and get aggregated information within a same platform seems to be crucial to better analyze community health

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1. Why DevRel should care about software development metrics Ana Jiménez Santamaría Marketing at Bitergia @anajsana95 anajs@bitergia.com DevRel Tokyo 2019
2. DevRel need to show how attractive a specific software project is and keep developers motivated, engaged and get more and more developers to either use or contribute to their software project. Motivation
3. Motivation Developer Community is different from other communities, and the way they interact with the product involves a wide variety of touch points
4. Motivation Every community member follows a different “engagement journey”. Do we know how our developer community behaves within our marketing funnel?
5. DevRel Core competencies The Developer Relations cycle. Image source from Reto Meier’s post: The Core Competencies of Developer Relations
6. Marketing funnel Discovery Consideration Conversion Retention Web site, meetup, social media, etc Forums,collaboration hubs, chats, docs Emails, collaboration hubs, forums, chats Docs, forums, emails, chats, collaboration hubs How does each community member behave within our marketing funnel?
7. Touch Points Tickets/Issues GitHub GitLab Bugzilla Jira Code Review Gerrit GitHub GitLab Meetings/Events Meetup Eventbrite Website Chats Slack Mattermost Telegram Social Media Twitter Mailing lists Groups.io Google Groups Q&A Forums Askbot StackOverflow Discourse Collect feedback from community How developers interact with your product? Documentation Read the docs Confluence MediaWiki
8. “To measure is to know” “If you can not measure it, you cannot improve it” Lord Kelvin
9. Does a DevRel have a specific place to collect feedback from the community? Can we get evidence about these data sources and get aggregated information within a consistent platform? The real value from Community Analyzing Community Health
10. Why Software Development Analytics? Activity Community Who’s leading my software project? How many core, regular and casual developers are in my community? What developers come from outside the company? Which company do they work for? Performance Are we being efficient? Is product development getting done as expected? Are there any bottlenecks within the software development process? Where are my contributors? What external projects are they contributing at? Is my community growing?
11. Which is my developer “engagement journey”?: Developer activity lifecycle Visualizing aggregated information
12. Who’s leading my software project? Which core developers came from outside the company? Visualizing aggregated information
13. Is my product development getting done as expected? Are there any bottlenecks within the software development process? Visualizing aggregated information
14. DevRel tend to focus more on measuring awareness, based on social media, website, events and mailing lists. It might be because that’s what typically marketing analytics tools measure, and there is easy access to mature and well-known marketing tools Conclusions More than marketing analytics tools
15. DevRel tend to focus more on measuring awareness, based on social media, website, events and mailing lists. It might be because that’s what typically marketing analytics tools measure, and there is easy access to mature and well-known marketing tools Conclusions DevRel should get evidence about all the different data sources Developer Community interacts with, in order to have an overall view about the community health More than marketing analytics tools Limited analysis means limited facts
16. DevRel tend to focus more on measuring awareness, based on social media, website, events and mailing lists. It might be because that’s what typically marketing analytics tools measure, and there is easy access to mature and well-known marketing tools Conclusions DevRel should get evidence about all the different data sources Developer Community interacts with, in order to have an overall view about the community health Looking for Insights among the different touch points (SM, mailing lists, collaborations hubs, chats, forums, etc) is exhausting and time consuming. Being able to visualize aggregated information within a consistent platform might be a good solution to overcome this problem More than marketing analytics tools Limited analysis means limited facts All-in-one platform for better Insight analysis
17. Ana Jiménez Santamaría Marketing at Bitergia anajs@bitergia.com Thank you!