Engineering teams rely on certain metrics to assess their ability to deliver quality products, on time. This is a useful exercise, but execution has been lacking—with metric collation often handled via spreadsheet, or stand-alone tool. Neither approach is ideal for two reasons: 1) How—or more specifically where—metrics are collected silos them away from business context.

In an article titled The Worst Programmer I Know, Dan North, the creator of behavior-driven development, writes about a nearly fired developer he saved from the unemployment line. This developer consistently delivered zero story points, even though delivered story points was the primary metric for developer productivity at their (unnamed) software consultancy.

Businesses today have more access to information about their products and engineering teams than ever before, and the push to be data-driven is also at an all-time high. Engineering metrics can provide actionable insights that help accelerate technology and business impact.

This blog is a summary of Frost & Sullivan's extensive report on Cortex as the recipient of the Technology Innovation Leadership award for North American Internal Developer Portals. Read the full report here.

Developers are builders by nature (and profession), so many take pride in building their own solutions to problems from first principles, often using tools developed in open-source projects. So as Internal Developer Portals (IDPs) increased in popularity, it should come as no surprise that interest in open source IDPs increased in kind. While we may not yet have a fully opensource IDP platform, in this blog we’ll cover the open source components and platforms used to build IDPs from scratch.

Improving software health, security, and operational maturity are continuous programs—you’re never really “done” maintaining standards of quality. But what if specific parts of that program feel more urgent? Maybe you want to ensure all software has a README file attached, and at least 1 reviewer assigned... by next month? Hey, you gotta start somewhere!

An Internal Developer Portal (IDP) is the engineering system of record for tracking, improving, and building high-quality software. From services and APIs to Kubernetes clusters and data pipelines—IDPs abstract away the complexities of ensuring software security, maturity, production readiness, and more—all using data from your existing tools.

Software production has become exponentially more complex over the last few years as containerization and microservice architectures have exploded. These design decisions are rooted in aspirations of scalability and speed, but left unchecked, have devolved into data model mayhem, development silos, and environment inconsistencies.

Just like personal health, software health is best managed proactively so you can prevent issues before they occur and avoid costly, stressful outages. Cortex helps you track and improve the health of your software with Scorecards and Initiatives. Scorecards quantify software health by aggregating data from multiple sources to give you a continuous view into the health of your system. Initiatives use Scorecards to drive organizational improvement.

All of the most reliable software is driven by great operations. Your organization’s operational maturity is a measure of how consistently you apply best practices for building reliable software. Without tracking your operational maturity, it’s extremely difficult to know where and how to improve—before it’s too late and an incident causes you to lose a customer.