Software developers and cloud engineering teams are facing elevated levels of burnout, but data that provides a holistic view of an enterprise's people, operational, and process health could help reduce turnover on these teams, according to Christina Forney, chief product officer at Uplevel, a Seattle-based company that works with engineering teams to analyze the effectiveness of their developers.

The main roadblocks facing cloud development and engineering teams, Forney told SDxCentral, are a lack of alignment, tedious bug fixes and routine tasks, and the amount of time spent in meetings.

Uplevel provides what Forney described as an engineering effectiveness system that supports "continuous change and improvement through transparency and visibility into what’s happening across engineering." She said the company helps its customers integrate a data-driven approach to resource allocation that helps development teams align with broader business priorities.

This type of system builds company culture by using data to protect and prioritize developers' deep work time, manage overall team health, and show the impact of well-being efforts. "Ultimately, we’re helping them use data to align engineering efforts to business outcomes in a way that wasn’t possible for them before," Forney said.

While cloud developer well-being isn't a new idea, leaders have "never really had a way to do it right," Forney said. "How do you measure well-being?" She noted Uplevel's approach "has required a lot of out-of-the-box thinking, and we continue to learn from our ever-growing data set. But the idea itself isn’t all that unusual. We were just the first to do it in a meaningful way."

Uplevel approaches developer well-being data from three sides – people, operational, and process health – which help organizations "understand where there is opportunity for improvement," Forney said.

Data on people health measures how people are experiencing their work, and the vendor collects this quantitatively through time-management metrics like always-on, context switching, chat interruptions, and deep work.

"We have observed a strong correlation between deep work and always-on metrics," Forney said. "When developers aren’t getting enough time during the day to focus on harder problems, they tend to make up for those hours outside the bounds of an expected day." After a while, this scenario becomes a clear indication of burnout risk, she argued.

Operational health indicates the team's velocity and the stability and reliability of its systems. And process health studies how teams collaborate and how effectively members work together.

"The reality is that every team is unique because they are made up with unique individuals," Forney said. By analyzing individual team data, the vendor can offer broader guidance like consolidating meetings and carving out team hours for deep work, and more specific organizational recommendations like priority realignment.

The industry is continually evolving its processes for measuring engineering performance, "and there's no silver bullet," Forney said. "We believe people matter, and that ensuring you’re building a healthy, empowered team is a key component of that equation. It’s just harder to quantify than something like cycle time or release frequency."