Advantages
New Insights for Continuous Improvement
Organisations invest huge budgets in software
development without a reliable means to assess
the utilisation of engineers or the quality of code
that teams deliver. BlueOptima has solved this
problem, enabling organisations to optimise
efficiency in software development.
BlueOptima is a SaaS analytics platform that provides
software development source code delivery and quality
insight based on a truly objective measure of programmer
productivity: BlueOptima ACE™ (Actual Coding Effort).
This affords a precise understanding of the work software
developers deliver, enabling you to optimise velocity,
quality and cost in your software development
organisation.
Knowing how much Actual Coding Effort developers,
teams, or vendors invest per day, project, sprint or task
offers fair comparisons across developers, projects,
divisions, suppliers, languages and platforms.
BlueOptima has empowered customers to reduce their
software development costs by 20% within a year of
deployment.
How does it work?
BlueOptima analyses source code revisions via source
code repositories and task-tracking systems. This process
is fully automated. Source code always stays safely within
the secure confined of your network.
Actual Coding Effort is based on 36 static metrics of every
historic code revision made by every software developer.
These metrics are placed on a multi-dimensional
continuum, which benchmarks the magnitude of any
change subsequently made. This reliably estimates the
intellectual effort contributed to each change in terms of
Volume, Complexity and Interrelatedness.
The chart above from the BlueOptima UI shows the total productivity delivered at each of the cities where software is developed (bar) and the
average per day at each (line). This breakdown shows how practices and processes at various sites within an organisation facilitate better
productivity.
© BlueOptima 2015-2019. Contact us to learn more: +44 207 100 8740 / enquiries@blueoptima.com
• Understand the utilisation of your software
developers and quality of the code they deliver,
based on the world’s first objective measure of
developer productivity
• Fairly compare both productivity and quality of
individual developers, projects, releases, suppliers
• Identify productivity deficiencies and wastage
• Identify and propagate engineering best practice
• Monitor and validate improvements resulting from
improving and evolving processes
• Identify key contributors to technical debt
• See how developers impact code maintainability
The Best Start for New Projects
• Select the best provider; identify in-house or
outsourced developers most suitable for new
initiatives
• Improve onboarding by analysing the time taken
for new recruits to reach appropriate levels of
performance
• Recruit the right developers using objective data
through BlueOptima Predictive Assessment™
• Set realistic expectations for Productivity, Quality
and Cost in relation to peers, with the Cambridge
Performance Benchmark™. This data offers a basis
for goals for your enterprise overall and for various
delivery options, developer types and languages, as
well as informing improvement priorities.
Background
Based on seminal research at Cambridge University and
industry hardened over the years, BlueOptima has
been delivering software optimisation metrics since
2007 and now has offices in London, New York, and
Bangalore.
Client Base
9 of the world’s top 12 Universal Banks, 4 of the top 5
global telecommunications firms, and many more.
 Revision-level granularity allows multi-level analysis of developer, day, sprint, project, division, suppliers, city or country,
to understand software development delivery across the enterprise and identify ways to improve.
The chart below shows average and total productivity delivered by employer; where the organisation is using outsourcing suppliers. This insight supports
decisions around selecting suppliers. Further,BlueOptima empowers managers to stipulate which developers or teams within outsourcing suppliers they
would like to work on their projects.

City

Employer
The chart below shows cumulative Actual Coding Effort (shaded), as well as daily average Actual Coding Effort per month, over one year, invested
in three different projects, allowing managers to check productivity consistency over time.

Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec
Jan

The multi-dimensional view

In addition to understanding
software development delivery
rate, it is important to consider
software quality across teams,
suppliers, projects, etc.
BlueOptima has formulated an
approach to evaluating source
code quality that avoids the
false positives of counting pre-
set rule violations; The scatterplot above shows code maintainability vs productivity for a several projects. Those towards the
right-hand side are being developed with code that adheres more closely to the organisation’s normal
the basis of many practices. Bubbles near the top show greater productivity invested into the project. This enables comparison
software quality tools. of projects’ state with desired quality / velocity balance.

BlueOptima ART™ (Analysis of Relative Thresholds) is based on discovering the ranges of percentiles of file and
repository static metrics for your organisation.

Code revisions breaching these thresholds identify the areas of software development within your organisation that are
the best start points for tackling code maitainability. ART leverages ACE in quantifying the amount of ACE that is reducing
codebase maintainability ( – “Aberrant ACE”).

For more information about ACE and ART, please see www.blueoptima.com/ace and www.blueoptima.com/art.

© BlueOptima 2015-2019. Contact us to learn more: +44 207 100 8740 / enquiries@blueoptima.com
 The chart below compares the productivity of two recently recruited developers, over 12 months. One developer (the yellow line) started working for the
organisation in January and reached reasonable levels productivity by February. The other took nine months to reach the same productivity level. All charts
in the BlueOptima portal can be analysed by clicking a data point to reveal the source code interactions constituting the ACE observations. For example,
total Billable Coding Effort Hours for a developer as on this chart breaks down into details about each commit in the below table. Clicking a revision in the
table shows its effect on code maintainability in terms of each static metric that is used to evaluate quality through Analysis of Relative Thresholds.

Productivity, Quality and Cost in Context: Compare Your Organisation to Averages

Further to facilitating software development delivery cost-efficiency improvements across an enterprise, BlueOptima offers
a global Productivity, Quality and Cost reference point for CIOs.

Based on anonymised, aggregated

BlueOptima data
(>10 bn observations of
enterprise software developers
interacting with source code), the
Cambridge Performance
Benchmark™ reveals the
Productivity, Quality and Cost by
Industry, Country, or type of
Developer, Language or Task. This
unique data allows organisations
to compare performance levels
with industry peers, reassess
priorities for aspects of software
development to improve, and
base new initiatives on realistic
output goals.

For more information, please The above chart shows levels of Productivity, Quality, and Cost
contact us, or visit: per Actual Coding Effort Unit delivered in terms of Country.
www.blueoptima.com/benchmark

© BlueOptima 2015-2019. Contact us to learn more: +44 207 100 8740 / enquiries@blueoptima.com
The Best Start for Your Software Development Projects: Recruiting the Right Developers
BlueOptima helps you ensure the success of software development projects before they begin, by selecting the most
suitable developers. Our innovative recruitment offering, BlueOptima Predictive Assessment™, provides estimates of the
performance that candidates will deliver to your organisation in terms of BlueOptima’s productivity and quality metrics.

Results are based on the correlation between how well

candidates solve coding problems in test conditions and
using predictive analytics to anticipate the output and quality
of their source code contribution once in the workplace.
Real-World and Consistent
Once a candidate has completed our test, we provide
data in terms of performance you can expect that
candidate will deliver to you. BlueOptima Predictive
Assessment™ directly informs recruitment decisions.

Existing testing platforms typically give a score relative

An efficient alternative to the shortlisting stage
Inviting all applicants for software developer roles to take a
test rather than shortlisting them for interview through a
more subjective human assessment means a far faster
recruitment process to fill roles required. Further, the cost-
efficiency justifies reaching more applicants at the start of
the process in order to include more eligible candidates.
For more information, see www.blueoptima.com/pa
to others on a specific test - only ranking the
developers who have taken the same test. We’ve
made it possible to give candidates the test suitable
for their role, but provide data in the same terms as
all past and future test candidates, as well as
continuously improving validation of the predictive
power of the test to subsequent performance within
an organisation.
BlueOptima Predictive Assessment™ is a solution to
human excessive subjectivity of HR staff and
management in selecting candidates for interview
based on CVs and job applications. Documenting
requirements sought in terms of ACE and ART will
remain a meaningful consistent basis across an
enterprise, ready to be applied by new HR staff, or
recruiting software development managers.

© BlueOptima 2015-2019. Contact us to learn more: +44 207 100 8740 / enquiries@blueoptima.com