Engineering Efficiency — A short story

Looking into the VC Crystal Ball, is 2021 the year when Engineering Efficiency (EE) moves beyond early adopters?

The lowest common denominator for EE is the ability to collect data from across the developer toolchain, allowing teams to move faster collectively. It’s still a nascent sector, <$100m, but more importantly, growing 35% YoY.

EE tools allow organizations to break siloes and bring visibility to bottlenecks that may not be evident to engineers stuck in their work, further enabling teams to move as one. Use cases include managing technical debt, overall project management & organization analysis, and identifying cost drivers. However, realistically the vast majority of companies are struggling with getting any sort of visibility of their development work

Moreover, with the increasing volumes in data and data, complexity developers are now at risk of becoming even more of a bottleneck for organizations. The emergence and adoption of EE tools along with data democratization tools, such as Dataform and DBT will ultimately lead to an order of magnitude more effective developer organizations

Interestingly, there are quite a few players that have been around for the last 4–10 years, e.g. Codacy, Code Climate, Seerene, and Stepsize. Now, the 2nd wave of companies has emerged over the last 1–3 yrs, such as Swarmia, Jellyfish & OkayHQ.

This may be a sign of a space ‘finally’ moving to fruition and ultimately the broader adoption of EE tools will lead to teams getting a more holistic view of what is going on within their organizations, allow for greater collaboration and the development of better work habits among devs.