Author

Hello, I am Dr. Krishna Kumar, Founder and CEO of Exathink Research, a technical advisory firm that helps software companies use rigorous data and measurement to improve product development flow.

I am a software engineer and entrepreneur and for the last decade, have been working on developing practical techniques, including production quality tooling to “measure what matters” in improving how we make software.

The Polaris Advisor Program is a one-of-a-kind service, offering best in class measurement platform, combined with a consultative process to help you craft the right set of systems to measure what matters so that your company can achieve the business outcomes it desires

I have been building software since the early 90s. and never stopped being hands-on, so much of my work is focused on improving developer productivity and experience, but by addressing the systems in which developers work, rather than focusing on the minutiae of how people spend their time day to day.

What we talk about here

Everything related to software product development flow and how we can use data and measurement to rigorously improve how we can deliver the most valuable software even in the most messy complex environments that we all live and work in.

This includes data from developer tools, surveys, and just talking to people and understanding the reality of the lived experience of people doing the work.

It takes all of the above to do this work.

Software development as an industry, remains notoriously immature when it comes to using data to improve the way we work. We much prefer to follow frameworks, practices, and anecdotal evidence to structure how we work.

We prefer analog techniques to digital tools and prefer the comfort of imprecision and folklore, to the hard work of collecting and analyzing high-quality data to make decisions.

There are many aspects of software development that are indeed hard to measure, but improving flow - ensuring work at all levels from planning to execution and delivery to customers - is not one of them.

This is what we will dive into each week, here in this publication.

Why subscribe?

We will bring theory and practice together and explore what the state of the art in this space looks like and what it will take to drag our industry kicking and screaming into the 21st century.

I hope you’ll join me in this exploration.

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To find out more about the company that provides the tech for this newsletter, visit Substack.com.