Date & time
17:00
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Most engineering teams report on performance every week or month. Few can agree on what the numbers mean, whether they reflect real value, or whether anyone’s gaming them to look good.
More than half (57%) of engineering leaders say choosing which metrics to use is their biggest reporting challenge. Only 44% believe their current metrics reflect real value. And 65% admit they could tell performance had declined without looking at a single number.
This panel explores how leaders are actually measuring team performance in 2026: which metrics get tracked, which get deliberately avoided, and why. Lines of code remains the most avoided metric industry-wide (68%), with leaders citing gamification and AI’s ability to inflate it meaninglessly overnight.
We’ll also look at how AI is reshaping that picture entirely: 52% say the bottleneck in software delivery has shifted from writing code to reviewing it while 74% report improved understanding of unfamiliar codebases.
Drawing on LeadDev’s Engineering Team Performance Report 2026, this session unpacks what’s actually driving reporting decisions, and where the gap sits between what leaders report upward and what would tell them the truth.
Key takeaways:
- Which metrics are trusted, which are avoided, and why, including why 68% of teams avoid lines of code.
- Whether DORA and SPACE still hold up. DORA’s approval has climbed to 50%; SPACE awareness has fallen to 2023 levels.
- What’s shifting in code review, debugging, and architectural decision-making since AI adoption.
- How organizations are (or aren’t) measuring AI’s real impact, especially smaller companies, where 48% of orgs under 20 engineers have no plans to measure it at all.
