When a company adds external engineers to its team, sooner or later someone asks: is it working? It is a reasonable question. The collaboration is an investment, and it should be possible to judge whether it delivers.
The difficulty is that the easiest things to measure are often the least useful. Hours worked, tickets closed or lines of code tell you that people are busy, not whether the team is better off. This article suggests a more balanced way to look at it.
Start with the original goal
Every collaboration starts for a reason. Perhaps the team needed more capacity to deliver a roadmap. Perhaps a specific skill was missing. Perhaps the goal was to reduce pressure on overloaded people. Success should be measured against that reason.
Write the goal down at the start, in plain terms. For example: “deliver the new customer portal by the end of the year”, or “allow the core team to stop working evenings”. Coming back to it every few months is the simplest and most honest measure there is.
Look at team outcomes, not individual output
In an extended team, external engineers work alongside your own people. Measuring them separately can be misleading and can even damage collaboration. It is usually more useful to look at how the whole team is performing.
Useful questions include:
- Is the team delivering what it planned, more consistently than before?
- Are important items being completed rather than postponed?
- Is the time from starting work to releasing it getting shorter or longer?
- Are customers and stakeholders seeing more value?
Watch quality
More output is not success if quality falls. Some indicators to follow:
- The number and severity of defects found after release.
- How often releases need to be rolled back or fixed urgently.
- The time it takes to resolve incidents.
- Feedback from code reviews: are the same issues coming up repeatedly?
Quality indicators often reveal problems before delivery metrics do.
Assess integration
An extended team succeeds when external engineers work as genuine members of the team. This is harder to measure, but it is possible to observe:
- Do external engineers participate actively in planning, reviews and retrospectives?
- Do they raise risks and suggest improvements, or only complete assigned tasks?
- Do internal team members ask them for help and review their work?
- Is knowledge shared in both directions?
Short conversations with team leads and team members are often the best way to understand this.
Ask the people involved
Regular feedback from those who work with the extended team is valuable. A short check-in every month or quarter with the team lead, product owner and a few engineers, asking what is going well and what could be better, gives a clear picture. It also surfaces small issues early, while they are easy to solve.
Feedback should include the external engineers themselves. They often see obstacles, such as missing access or unclear priorities, that limit their contribution.
Metrics to treat with care
Some measures are tempting but should be used carefully, if at all:
- Hours worked show presence, not value.
- Tickets closed depend heavily on how tickets are sized.
- Lines of code can reward complexity rather than good solutions.
- Individual velocity encourages people to optimise for numbers rather than for the team.
These can provide context, but they should not be the main basis for judging success.
Give it time
New engineers need time to learn the product and the codebase. Judging an extended team after a few weeks usually leads to wrong conclusions. A fair review typically comes after several months, once onboarding is complete and the team has settled into a rhythm. Agreeing on review points in advance makes this easier.
Make it a shared conversation
Measuring success works best when it is done together with the partner rather than as a one-sided evaluation. Clear goals, regular feedback and honest conversations allow both sides to adjust early.
At Boomit, we review our Seamless Team Extension collaborations regularly with each client, based on the goals agreed at the start. If you would like to talk about how to set up and assess an extended team, we would be glad to hear from you at boomit.pt.