
Velocity or GitPrime? Read a head-to-head analysis to decide which is best for your team.
In competitive markets, the viability of a business depends on engineering performance. In their 2020 study of 400+ enterprises across 12 industries, McKinsey concluded that engineering departments performing in the top quartile of the Developer Velocity Index (DVI) “outperform others in the market by four to five times.”
Historically, however, engineering has been a black box. The average company invests millions of dollars a year into the department, but most have no way of assessing the returns.
This is why many market-leading organizations, like Kickstarter, Gusto and VMWare, are starting to adopt Engineering Intelligence to get visibility into their software development workflows. Doing so has enabled them to effectively improve performance, boost Time to Market, and out-innovate competitors.
The two most popular engineering analytics platforms, Velocity and GitPrime (recently acquired by Pluralsight Flow), both offer transparency into engineering performance and process efficiency but differ in their approaches.
To help you make a decision about which approach to engineering metrics works best for your team, we put together a thorough head-to-head comparison of Velocity and GitPrime. Read the post through, or click on a link to skip to the section that’s most important to you.
Setting Up
Coaching
Tracking Progress
Goal Setting
Scope of Visibility
Surfacing Issues
Customization
Cost
Tl;dr: The setup process can be just as fast for both, GitPrime and Velocity, so you can be up and running as soon as your data imports.
First, you’ll want to know the time and effort it takes to get set up, so you can have an accurate expectation of how soon you’ll be up and running. Both analytics tools recognize the friction involved with process changes, so they’ve done their best to streamline this experience.
Start setting up Velocity by first signing in with your GitHub or Bitbucket account. Once you’re in, you’ll be prompted to add your repositories, so you can start seeing your engineering data in the app.
GitPrime has a similar setup process. You start by creating a new GitPrime account and then setting up integrations with whichever Git or product management tools you might be using.
GitPrime supports more version control systems than Velocity, and each has a slightly different workflow. You can import repos accessible over HTTPS or SSH from any server, or use OAuth to connect to your GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket organization.
From there, you’ll also have to organize your data. You won’t be able to assign repos to applications, but you organize them by tag. Contributors can similarly be hidden from reports, merged or assigned to teams.
Tl;dr: Velocity has a more robust set of coaching features than GitPrime. Whereas GitPrime offers a few metrics per developer, Velocity offers a 360 degree view that covers the day-to-day, week-to-week improvement, and long-term development.
A top priority that we often hear from organizations looking to invest in engineering analytics is the need to improve team and individual performance.
Velocity’s 360 reports combine all coaching features in one comprehensive report that provides a complete picture of developers’ and teams’ work habits. GitPrime reduces developer performance to a few key metrics, and offers more prescriptive guidelines.
Velocity’s Developer360 report gives managers instant visibility into your developer’s active work, improvements along key metrics, and skills.
The report includes four tabs:
Velocity’s Developer360 report focuses on objective metrics and does not presume what they may indicate. We recommend Velocity for teams who are looking to avoid reductive metrics.
GitPrime has two main reports for coaching developers:
GitPrime’s coaching reports are a fit for leaders who desire suggestions towards specific action based on how a given contributor is performing relative to their peers. For those who prefer GitPrime’s more prescriptive approach to coaching, however, we recommend keeping in mind that metrics don’t always paint a full picture.
For example, if you look at PR Throughput on this graph, you’ll see how many changes a given developer has shipped in contrast to his or her team members. But a data point on the top right of the graph doesn’t include the context that many of the deploys were relatively small in impact.
Tl;dr: Both tools provide at-a-glance dashboards that let you see trends over weeks, months or quarters. Velocity provides more PR-related metrics and has a real-time view into how you’re doing this sprint. These metrics allow you to evaluate progress across projects, sprints, and cohorts, making it possible to implement high-level process changes that can fundamentally improve the way your team works. GitPrime has more contributor-based metrics, which make it more difficult to help your entire team improve together.
The same insights that previously required hours of digging through repos and countless 1:1s are available at-a-glance in both analytics tools. But each application tracks “progress” slightly differently. Where Velocity makes it easy to track process-level metrics like Push Volume and compare progress across teams and time periods, GitPrime prioritizes reports that track metrics by individual contributor.
Velocity has two main features that allow for progress tracking:
Velocity makes it easier to do things like identify and learn from your highest-performing teams, or track the success of particular initiatives. For example, you might track new developers’ Deploy Volume to evaluate how they’re progressing with onboarding based on how much of their work is making it into the codebase. And if our standard reports don’t include the insights you need, you can use our customizable Analytics report to dig even deeper into your data.
Velocity’s progress tracking reports are most suitable for managers who interpret metrics as insights about the work, not the person.
GitPrime has its own report for progress tracking:
GitPrime’s Project Timeline report best complements a management style that prioritizes tracking contributor performance over PR- and process-related metrics.
Tl;dr: Both applications include robust goal-setting features. The approaches differ in the types of goal-setting capabilities provided.
The goal of adopting an Engineering Intelligence tool is to use the greater visibility found in metrics to drive positive change in your organization.
Both Velocity and GitPrime include target-setting reports, but whereas Velocity tracks progress in terms of success rates, GitPrime tracks averages in their goal-setting system.
Since high-performance in engineering is critical to business success, you can use Velocity’s Targets feature to measure, improve, and communicate progress using objective metrics that support departmental initiatives. This report serves as concrete data to inform any OKR or KPI-related conversation, while the ability to drill-down into outliers enables team members to diagnose why targets aren’t met.
Within Velocity’s Targets feature, executives, leaders, and front-line managers can build a dashboard of reports that visualize progress toward goals in terms of success rates or averages.
When setting a goal, many leaders find that tracking averages over time doesn’t properly represent the progress that’s being made toward that goal.
If you’re tracking PR size, for example, a single, long-running PR might obscure the dozens of PRs that moved quickly through the pipeline. If you’re tracking Review Speed, a single neglected review inaccurately suggests inefficiencies in the review process.
Thus, Velocity’s Targets report is tailored to engineering leaders who acknowledge anomalies and believe that it’s acceptable for a few data points to be outside an expected target.
Instead of success rates, GitPrime tracks averages in their goal-setting systems.
GitPrime’s Fundamentals report is most compatible with managers who prefer the more common approach of tracking averages. However, it is important to note that if you have an outlier in your data — maybe one particularly complicated PR required a lot of back and forth in Code Review — that outlier will throw off your average. This can make it difficult to see the overall trend, and inaccurately suggest inefficiencies.
Tl;dr: If you want to evaluate your process from end-to-end, you’re better off going with Velocity, which was built specifically for CD. Conversely, GitPrime was built for coding efficiency with an emphasis on Code Review and doesn’t include data from before a PR is opened and when it is merged.
While most of the industry is actively adopting Continuous Delivery, few have set up any way to measure their progress.
To optimize or adopt CD processes, organizations need a complete, end-to-end picture of their engineering processes. Concrete metrics, such as those found within Velocity and GitPrime, are a prerequisite for ensuring success in this transition.
Velocity is the only application in its category to shine a light on the entire software development process. Key metrics you need when measuring CD include: Cycle Time, Deploy Volume, Time to Open, Time to Review, and Time to Merge, the majority of which are not available in GitPrime.
Our objective is to eventually incorporate data from every important tool that an engineer touches.
Teams looking to optimize each part of their software delivery pipeline, not just Code Review, are better off going with Velocity.
GitPrime was originally built to improve coding efficiency and has since built Code Review features as an add-on. This leaves important parts of the software delivery processes obscure–such as what happens before a PR is opened or after it is merged.
Teams focused exclusively on optimizing their Code Review processes will benefit more from the granularity found in GitPrime’s Review Workflow report.
Tl;dr: Velocity, with PR-related metrics at the core of the product, does a better job drawing attention (inside and outside of the app) to actual artifacts of work that could be stuck or problematic. GitPrime, with mostly people-focused metrics, draws attention to contributors who could be stuck or problematic.
Engineering is expected to continuously deliver business value to your organization, but a single bottleneck can hold up the entire team during any given sprint. The larger your team gets, the harder it becomes for you to discern what work is stuck in the pipeline and why.
Velocity and GitPrime take different approaches to identifying outliers or irregular work patterns.
Velocity employs a variety of visualizations to help you find the root cause of any issue that might slow down your team:
Your team is also able to spot issues outside the application through daily standup reports, available via email or Slack. Velocity, thus, isn’t an analytics tool for top-down management but for leaders wishing to keep the whole team on track.
GitPrime’s core product ties each issue to a contributor, which gives managers an easy way to determine who to go to when something goes wrong on a particular week or month. Only in the collaboration reports, available in higher tiers, is there insight into problematic work products, such as PRs.
Here’s where you’d look to find inefficiencies, bottlenecks, and stuck engineers:
We recommend GitPrime for managers who prefer visibility into low-performance developers over visibility into stuck work.
Tl;dr: Velocity includes customizable reports that allow you ask questions of your data to derive more meaningful insights. GitPrime does not have custom reporting, but they do offer an API.
If you have unique requirements or track a unique metric, you might require a more flexible platform. Here’s how your two options compare.
Velocity has an entire feature set dedicated to making the product more flexible for teams who work off the beaten path:
Velocity is the best option for engineering organizations who’d like the flexibility to build any charts that aren’t already available out-of-the-box.
GitPrime does not have custom reporting, but they do offer an API in their Enterprise package for customers who have the resources to build out their own reports.
There is also portion of the application where users can set simple targets for the entire organization, teams, and contributors.
GitPrime is a good fit for customers who have the resources to build out their own reports.
Tl;dr: While pricing of the two products is competitive, GitPrime restricts more features in their lower tiers. Velocity offers more capabilities for less, and the flexibility of their platform allows for customizability irrespective of cost.
The two products do not differ much in terms of pricing, so if you’re operating within significant budget constraints, a built-it-yourself solution is probably most feasible. Otherwise, both products tier slightly differently, so make sure you’re getting the core features that are most important to your team.
Velocity has four pricing packages based on team size, including a free option for teams of 10 or fewer. For teams of 10+, pricing starts at $449/seat per year. Each tier includes access to all metrics and reports (including the flexible Analytics report) and gives teams access to unlimited historical data.
The small and medium tiers are limited in number of repos (50 and 100, respectively), while the largest priced tier is not. The team reporting function, which lets you see metrics summarized on a team-by-team basis, is not available until the largest tier.
GitPrime has a more complex pricing system. They have 3 tiers with different features, and a sliding pricing scale, based on how many engineers are in your organization. Their pricing starts at $499, but they limit a lot of their features in the lower tiers.
The lowest tier does not include their “code review collaboration insights.” They also restrict the historical data they make available– 12 months for the first tier and 36 months for the second tier.
Engineering excellence drives business performance. The teams that are excelling in the space are the ones that have the vernacular to talk about developer performance and the tools to improve it.
To this end, Velocity data serves three primary purposes. It’s used to:
Most importantly, Velocity has a few more tools to put your learnings into action. You can set up Slack and email alerts for irregular activity and you have a first-class targets system to encourage your team to improve.
Conversely, GitPrime’s main focus is individual performance, importing data from Git, which means their tool primarily works off of source-code level data, not collaborative work data.
GitPrime equips a manager to keep closer track of their engineers, so they have a clear idea of the strongest and weakest performers of the team. This approach is for hands-on managers who still want an active role in how their direct reports work.

Navigating the world of software engineering or developer productivity insights can feel like trying to solve a complex puzzle, especially for large-scale organizations. It's one of those areas where having a cohesive strategy can make all the difference between success and frustration. Over the years, as I’ve worked with enterprise-level organizations, I’ve seen countless instances where a lack of strategy caused initiatives to fail or fizzle out.
In my latest webinar, I breakdown the key components engineering leaders need to consider when building an insights strategy.
At the heart of every successful software engineering team is a drive for three things:
These goals sound simple enough, but in reality, achieving them requires more than just wishing for better performance. It takes data, action, and, most importantly, a cultural shift. And here's the catch: those three things don't come together by accident.
In my experience, whenever a large-scale change fails, there's one common denominator: a lack of a cohesive strategy. Every time I’ve witnessed a failed attempt at implementing new technology or making a big shift, the missing piece was always that strategic foundation. Without a clear, aligned strategy, you're not just wasting resources—you’re creating frustration across the entire organization.

Sign up for a free, expert-led insights strategy workshop for your enterprise org.
The first step in any successful engineering insights strategy is defining why you're doing this in the first place. If you're rolling out developer productivity metrics or an insights platform, you need to make sure there’s alignment on the purpose across the board.
Too often, organizations dive into this journey without answering the crucial question: Why do we need this data? If you ask five different leaders in your organization, are you going to get five answers, or will they all point to the same objective? If you can’t answer this clearly, you risk chasing a vague, unhelpful path.
One way I recommend approaching this is through the "Five Whys" technique. Ask why you're doing this, and then keep asking "why" until you get to the core of the problem. For example, if your initial answer is, “We need engineering metrics,” ask why. The next answer might be, “Because we're missing deliverables.” Keep going until you identify the true purpose behind the initiative. Understanding that purpose helps avoid unnecessary distractions and lets you focus on solving the real issue.
Once the purpose is clear, the next step is to think about who will be involved in this journey. You have to consider the following:
It’s also crucial to account for organizational changes. Reorgs are common in the enterprise world, and as your organization evolves, so too must your insights platform. If the people responsible for the platform’s maintenance change, who will ensure the data remains relevant to the new structure? Too often, teams stop using insights platforms because the data no longer reflects the current state of the organization. You need to have the right people in place to ensure continuous alignment and relevance.
The next key component is process—a step that many organizations overlook. It's easy to say, "We have the data now," but then what happens? What do you expect people to do with the data once it’s available? And how do you track if those actions are leading to improvement?
A common mistake I see is organizations focusing on metrics without a clear action plan. Instead of just looking at a metric like PR cycle times, the goal should be to first identify the problem you're trying to solve. If the problem is poor code quality, then improving the review cycle times might help, but only because it’s part of a larger process of improving quality, not just for the sake of improving the metric.
It’s also essential to approach this with an experimentation mindset. For example, start by identifying an area for improvement, make a hypothesis about how to improve it, then test it and use engineering insights data to see if your hypothesis is correct. Starting with a metric and trying to manipulate it is a quick way to lose sight of your larger purpose.
The next piece of the puzzle is your program and rollout strategy. It’s easy to roll out an engineering insights platform and expect people to just log in and start using it, but that’s not enough. You need to think about how you'll introduce this new tool to the various stakeholders across different teams and business units.
The key here is to design a value loop within a smaller team or department first. Get a team to go through the full cycle of seeing the insights, taking action, and then quantifying the impact of that action. Once you've done this on a smaller scale, you can share success stories and roll it out more broadly across the organization. It’s not about whether people are logging into the platform—it’s about whether they’re driving meaningful change based on the insights.
And finally, we come to the platform itself. It’s the shiny object that many organizations focus on first, but as I’ve said before, it’s the last piece of the puzzle, not the first. Engineering insights platforms like Code Climate are powerful tools, but they can’t solve the problem of a poorly defined strategy.
I’ve seen organizations spend months evaluating these platforms, only to realize they didn't even know what they needed. One company in the telecom industry realized that no available platform suited their needs, so they chose to build their own. The key takeaway here is that your platform should align with your strategy—not the other way around. You should understand your purpose, people, and process before you even begin evaluating platforms.
To build a successful engineering insights strategy, you need to go beyond just installing a tool. An insights platform can only work if it’s supported by a clear purpose, the right people, a well-defined process, and a program that rolls it out effectively. The combination of these elements will ensure that your insights platform isn’t just a dashboard—it becomes a powerful driver of change and improvement in your organization.
Remember, a successful software engineering insights strategy isn’t just about the tool. It’s about building a culture of data-driven decision-making, fostering continuous improvement, and aligning all your teams toward achieving business outcomes. When you get that right, the value of engineering insights becomes clear.
Want to build a tailored engineering insights strategy for your enterprise organization? Get expert recommendations at our free insights strategy workshop. Register here.
Andrew Gassen has guided Fortune 500 companies and large government agencies through complex digital transformations. He specializes in embedding data-driven, experiment-led approaches within enterprise environments, helping organizations build a culture of continuous improvement and thrive in a rapidly evolving world.

Most organizations are great at communicating product releases—but rarely do the same for process improvements that enable those releases. This is a missed opportunity for any leader wanting to expand “growth mindset,” as curiosity and innovation is as critical for process improvement as it is product development.
Curiosity and innovation aren’t limited to product development. They’re just as essential in how your teams deliver that product. When engineering and delivery leaders share what they’re doing to find efficiencies and unclog bottlenecks, they not only improve Time to Value — they help their peers level up too.
Below is a template leaders can use via email or communication app (Slack, Microsoft Teams) to share process changes with their team. I’ve personally seen updates like this generate the same level of energy as product announcements—complete with clap emojis👏 and follow-up pings like “Tell me more!” Even better, they’re useful for performance reviews and make great resume material for the leads who author them (excluding any sensitive or proprietary content, of course).
Subject: [Experiment update]
[Date]
Experiment Lead: [Name]
Goal: [Enter the longer term goal your experiment was in service of]
Opportunity: [Describe a bottleneck or opportunity you identified for some focused improvement]
Problem: [Describe the specific problem you aimed to solve]
Solution: [Describe the very specific solution you tested]
Metric(s): [What was the one metric you determined would help you know if your solution solved the problem? Were there any additional metrics you kept track of, to understand how they changed as well?]
Action: [Describe, in brief, what you did to get the result]
Result: [What was the result of the experiment, in terms of the above metrics?]
Next Step: [What will you do now? Will you run another experiment like this, design a new one, or will you rollout the solution more broadly?]
Key Learnings: [What did you learn during this experiment that is going to make your next action stronger?]
Please reach out to [experiment lead’s name] for more detail.
Subject: PR Descriptions Boost Review Speed by 30%
March 31, 2025
Experiment Lead: Mary O’Clary
Goal: We must pull a major capability from Q4 2024 into Q2 2025 to increase our revenue. We believe we can do this by improving productivity by 30%.
Opportunity: We found lack of clear descriptions were a primary cause of churn & delay during the review cycle. How might we improve PR descriptions, with information reviewers need?
Problem: Help PR Reviewers more regularly understand the scope of PRs, so they don’t need to ask developers a bunch of questions.
Solution: Issue simple guidelines for what we are looking for PR descriptions
Metric(s): PR Review Speed. We also monitored overall PR Cycle Time, assuming it would also improve for PRs closed within our experiment timeframe.
Action: We ran this experiment over one 2 week sprint, with no substantial changes in complexity of work or composition of the team. We kept the timeframe tight to help eliminate additional variables.
Result: We saw PR Review Speed increase by 30%
Next Step: Because of such a great result and low perceived risk, we will roll this out across Engineering and continue to monitor both PR Review Speed & PR Cycle Time.
Key Learnings: Clear, consistent PR descriptions reduce reviewer friction without adding developer overhead, giving us confidence to expand this practice org-wide to help accelerate key Q2 2025 delivery.
Please reach out to Mary for more detail.
My recommendation is to appoint one “editor in chief” to issue these updates each week. They should CC the experiment lead on the communication to provide visibility. In the first 4-6 weeks, this editor may need to actively solicit reports and coach people on what to share. This is normal—you’re building a new behavior. During that time, it's critical that managers respond to these updates with kudos and support, and they may need to be prompted to do so in the first couple of weeks.
If these updates become a regular ritual, within ~3 months, you’ll likely have more contributions than you can keep up with. That’s when the real cultural shift happens: people start sharing without prompting, and process improvement becomes part of how your org operates.
I’ve seen this work in large-scale organizations, from manufacturing to healthcare. Whether your continuous improvement culture is just getting started or already mature, this small practice can help you sustain momentum and deepen your culture of learning.
Give it a shot, and don’t forget to celebrate the wins along the way.
Jen Handler is the Head of Professional Services at Code Climate. She’s an experienced technology leader with 20 years of building teams that deliver outcome-driven products for Fortune 50 companies across industries including healthcare, hospitality, retail, and finance. Her specialties include goal development, lean experimentation, and behavior change.

Output is not the same as impact. Flow is not the same as effectiveness. Most of us would agree with these statements—so why does the software industry default to output and flow metrics when measuring success? It’s a complex issue with multiple factors, but the elephant in the room is this: mapping engineering insights to meaningful business impact is far more challenging than measuring developer output or workflow efficiency.
Ideally, data should inform decisions. The problem arises when the wrong data is used to diagnose a problem that isn’t the real issue. Using misaligned metrics leads to misguided decisions, and unfortunately, we see this happen across engineering organizations of all sizes. While many companies have adopted Software Engineering Intelligence (SEI) platforms—whether through homegrown solutions or by partnering with company that specializes in SEI like Code Climate—a clear divide has emerged. Successful and mature organizations leverage engineering insights to drive real improvements, while others collect data without extracting real value—or worse, make decisions aimed solely at improving a metric rather than solving a real business challenge.
From our experience partnering with large enterprises with complex structures and over 1,000 engineers, we’ve identified three key factors that set high-performing engineering organizations apart.
When platform engineering first emerged, early innovators adopted the mantra of “platform as a product” to emphasize the key principles that drive successful platform teams. The same mindset applies to Software Engineering Intelligence (SEI). Enterprise organizations succeed when they treat engineering insights as a product rather than just a reporting tool.
Data shouldn’t be collected for the sake of having it—it should serve a clear purpose: helping specific users achieve specific outcomes. Whether for engineering leadership, product teams, or executive stakeholders, high-performing organizations ensure that engineering insights are:
Rather than relying on pre-built dashboards with generic engineering metrics, mature organizations customize reporting to align with team priorities and business objectives.
For example, one of our healthcare customers is evaluating how AI coding tools like GitHub Copilot and Cursor might impact their hiring plans for the year. They have specific questions to answer and are running highly tailored experiments, making a custom dashboard essential for generating meaningful, relevant insights. With many SEI solutions, they would have to externalize data into another system or piece together information from multiple pages, increasing overhead and slowing down decision-making.
High-performing enterprise organizations don’t treat their SEI solution as static. Team structures evolve, business priorities shift, and engineering workflows change. Instead of relying on one-size-fits-all reporting, they continuously refine their insights to keep them aligned with business and engineering goals. Frequent iteration isn’t a flaw—it’s a necessary feature, and the best organizations design their SEI operations with this in mind.
Many software engineering organizations focus primarily on code-related metrics, but writing code is just one small piece of the larger business value stream—and rarely the area with the greatest opportunities for improvement. Optimizing code creation can create a false sense of progress at best and, at worst, introduce unintended bottlenecks that negatively impact the broader system.
High-performing engineering organizations recognize this risk and instead measure the effectiveness of the entire system when evaluating the impact of changes and decisions. Instead of focusing solely on PR cycle time or commit activity, top-performing teams assess the entire journey:
For example, reducing code review time by a few hours may seem like an efficiency win, but if completed code sits for six weeks before deployment, that improvement has little real impact. While this may sound intuitive, in practice, it’s far more complicated—especially in matrixed or hierarchical organizations, where different teams own different parts of the system. In these environments, it’s often difficult, though not impossible, for one group to influence or improve a process owned by another.
One of our customers, a major media brand, had excellent coding metrics yet still struggled to meet sprint goals. While they were delivering work at the expected rate and prioritizing the right items, the perception of “failed sprints” persisted, creating tension for engineering leadership. After further analysis, we uncovered a critical misalignment: work was being added to team backlogs after sprints had already started, without removing any of the previously committed tasks. This shift in scope wasn’t due to engineering inefficiency—it stemmed from the business analysts' prioritization sessions occurring after sprint commitments were made. A simple rescheduling of prioritization ceremonies—ensuring that business decisions were finalized before engineering teams committed to sprint goals. This small yet system-wide adjustment significantly improved delivery consistency and alignment—something that wouldn’t have been possible without examining the entire end-to-end process.
There are many frameworks, methodologies, and metrics often referenced as critical to the engineering insights conversation. While these can be useful, they are not inherently valuable on their own. Why? Because it all comes down to strategy. Focusing on managing a specific engineering metric or framework (i.e. DORA or SPACE) is missing the forest for the trees. Our most successful customers have a clear, defined, and well-communicated strategy for their software engineering insights program—one that doesn’t focus on metrics by name. Why? Because unless a metric is mapped to something meaningful to the business, it lacks the context to be impactful.
Strategic engineering leaders at large organizations focus on business-driven questions, such as:
Tracking software engineering metrics like cycle time, PR size, or deployment frequency can be useful indicators, but they are output metrics—not impact metrics. Mature organizations go beyond reporting engineering speed and instead ask: "Did this speed up product releases in a way that drove revenue?"
While challenging to measure, this is where true business value lies. A 10% improvement in cycle time may indicate progress, but if sales remain flat, did it actually move the needle? Instead of optimizing isolated metrics, engineering leaders should align their focus with overarching business strategy. If an engineering metric doesn’t directly map to a key strategic imperative, it’s worth reevaluating whether it’s the right thing to measure.
One of our retail customers accelerated the release of a new digital capability, allowing them to capture additional revenue a full quarter earlier than anticipated. Not only did this directly increase revenue, but the extended timeline of revenue generation created a long-term financial impact—a result that finance teams, investors, and the board highly valued. The team was able to trace their decisions back to insights derived from their engineering data, proving the direct connection between software delivery and business success.
Understanding the broader business strategy isn’t optional for high-performing engineering organizations—it’s a fundamental requirement. Through our developer experience surveys, we’ve observed a significant difference between the highest-performing organizations and the rest as it relates to how well developers understand the business impact they are responsible for delivering. Organizations that treat engineers as task-takers, isolated from business impact, consistently underperform—even if their coding efficiency is exceptional. The engineering leaders at top-performing organizations prioritize alignment with strategy and avoid the distraction of tactical metrics that fail to connect to meaningful business outcomes.
Learn how to shift from micro engineering adjustments to strategic business impact. Request a Code Climate Diagnostic.

Code Climate has supported thousands of engineering teams of all sizes over the past decade, enhancing team health, advancing DevOps practices, and providing visibility into engineering processes. According to Gartner®, the Software Engineering Intelligence (SEI) platform market is expanding as engineering leaders increasingly leverage these platforms to enhance productivity and drive business value. As pioneers in the SEI space, the Code Climate team has identified three key takeaways from partnerships with our Fortune 100 customers:
The above takeaways have prompted a strategic shift in Code Climate’s roadmap, now centered on enterprise organizations with complex engineering team structure and workflows. As part of this transition, our flagship Software Engineering Intelligence (SEI) platform, Velocity, is now replaced by an enhanced SEI platform, custom-designed for each leader and their organization. With enterprise-level scalability, Code Climate provides senior engineering leaders complete autonomy over their SEI platform, seamlessly integrating into their workflows while delivering the customization, flexibility, and reliability needed to tackle business challenges.
Moreover, we understand that quantitative metrics from a data platform alone cannot transform an organization, which is why Code Climate is now a Software Engineering Intelligence Solutions Partner—offering five key characteristics that define our approach
"During my time at Pivotal Software, Inc., I met with hundreds of engineering executives who consistently asked, “How do I improve my software engineering organization?” These conversations revealed a universal challenge: aligning engineering efforts with business goals. I joined Code Climate because I'm passionate about helping enterprise organizations address these critical questions with actionable insights and data-driven strategies that empower engineering executives to drive meaningful change." - Josh Knowles, CEO of Code Climate
Ready to make data-driven engineering decisions to maximize business impact? Request a consultation.

Today, we’re excited to share that Code Climate Quality has been spun out into a new company: Qlty Software. Code Climate is now focused entirely on its next phase of Velocity, our Software Engineering Intelligence (SEI) solution for enterprise organizations

I founded Code Climate in 2011 to help engineering teams level up with data. Our initial Quality product was a pioneer for automated code review, helping developers merge with confidence by bringing maintainability and code coverage metrics into the developer workflow.
Our second product, Velocity, was launched in 2018 as the first Software Engineering Intelligence (SEI) platform to deliver insights about the people and processes in the end-to-end software development lifecycle.
All the while, we’ve been changing the way modern software gets built. Quality is reviewing code written by tens of thousands of engineers, and Velocity is helping Fortune 500 companies drive engineering transformation as they adopt AI-enabled workflows.
Today, Quality and Velocity serve different types of software engineering organizations, and we are investing heavily in each product for their respective customers.
To serve both groups better, we’re branching out into two companies. We’re thrilled to introduce Qlty Software, and to focus Code Climate on software engineering intelligence.
Over the past year, we’ve made more significant upgrades to Quality and our SEI platform, Velocity, than ever before. Much of that is limited early access, and we’ll have a lot to share publicly soon. As separate companies, each can double down on their products.
Qlty Software is dedicated to taking the toil out of code maintenance. The new company name represents our commitment to code quality. We’ve launched a new domain, with a brand new, enhanced edition of the Quality product.
I’m excited to be personally moving into the CEO role of Qlty Software to lead this effort. Josh Knowles, Code Climate’s General Manager, will take on the role of CEO of Code Climate, guiding the next chapter as an SEI solutions partner for technology leaders at large, complex organizations.
We believe the future of developer tools to review and improve code automatically is brighter than ever – from command line tools accelerating feedback loops to new, AI-powered workflows – and we’re excited to be on that journey with you.
-Bryan
CEO, Qlty Software

Technology is evolving very quickly but I don't believe it's evolving as quickly as expectations for it. This has become increasingly apparent to me as I've engaged in conversations with Code Climate's customers, who are senior software engineering leaders across different organizations. While the technology itself is advancing rapidly, the expectations placed on it are evolving at an even faster pace, possibly twice as quickly.
There's Generative AI, such as Copilot, the No-code/Low-code space, and the concept of Software Engineering Intelligence (SEI) platforms, as coined by Gartner®. The promises associated with these tools seem straightforward:
However, the reality isn’t as straightforward as the messaging may seem:
When I joined Code Climate a year ago, one recurring question from our customers was, "We see our data, but what's the actionable next step?" While the potential of these technologies is compelling, it's critical to address and understand their practical implications. Often, business or non-technical stakeholders embrace the promises while engineering leaders, responsible for implementation, grapple with the complex realities.
Software engineering leaders now face increased pressure to achieve more with fewer resources, often under metrics that oversimplify their complex responsibilities. It's no secret that widespread layoffs have affected the technology industry in recent years. Despite this, the scope of their responsibilities and the outcomes expected from them by the business haven't diminished. In fact, with the adoption of new technologies, these expectations have only increased.
Viewing software development solely in terms of the number of features produced overlooks critical aspects such as technical debt or the routine maintenance necessary to keep operations running smoothly. Adding to that, engineering leaders are increasingly pressured to solve non-engineering challenges within their domains. This disconnect between technical solutions and non-technical issues highlights a fundamental gap that can't be bridged by engineering alone—it requires buy-in and understanding from all stakeholders involved.
This tension isn't new, but it's becoming front-and-center thanks to the promises of new technologies mentioned above. These promises create higher expectations for business leaders, which, in turn, trickle down to engineering leaders who are expected to navigate these challenges, which trickle down to the teams doing the work. Recently, I had a conversation with a Code Climate customer undergoing a significant adoption of GitHub Copilot, a powerful tool. This particular leader’s finance team told her, "We bought this new tool six months ago and you don't seem to be operating any better. What's going on?" This scenario reflects the challenges many large engineering organizations face.
Here's how Code Climate is helping software engineering leaders take actionable steps to address challenges with new technology:
In addition, we partner with our enterprise customers to experiment and assess the impact of new technologies. For instance, let's use the following experiment template to justify the adoption of Copilot:
We believe offering Copilot to _______ for [duration] will provide sufficient insights to inform our purchasing decision for a broader, organization-wide rollout.
We will know what our decision is if we see ______ increase/decrease.
Let’s fill in the blanks:
We believe offering Copilot to one portfolio of 5 teams for one quarter will provide sufficient insights to inform our purchasing decision for a broader, organization-wide rollout.
We will know what our decision is if we see:
Andrew Gassen leads Code Climate's enterprise customer organization, partnering with engineering leaders for organization-wide diagnostics to identify critical focus areas and provide customized solutions. Request a consultation to learn more.