Introducing the VMware Tanzu Labs Development Efficiency Assessment

While the debate about the effectiveness between remote and hybrid working models continues, many of our customers are still structuring their teams across both of these models. However, instead of asking whether we should be remote or in-office, what we’ve observed is that our customers want and need a clear opinion on how to efficiently set up their teams and practices to ensure their software team’s success in a fully remote or hybrid environment.

Based on our team’s long history of exemplifying best practices, we set out to document our thoughts on what makes a high-performing and healthy software team, which lead to the creation of our Development Efficiency Score (DES). While originally this score was an internal tool used by our team leads to assess the current state at the beginning of a client engagement, we soon recognized the value in making it publicly available.

In order to help organizations leverage our DES, we set out to create a user-friendly tool that would allow anyone to complete a short survey and then receive a series of recommendations, covering everything from developer hardware to pushing code to production. Using this tool we hope teams are able to find new templates, tool suggestions, practices, and other tips to unlock their team’s full capacity, particularly those that support fully remote or hybrid work.

This blog outlines how your team can leverage the Development Efficiency Assessment tool to generate some actionable insights and ultimately improve your development efficiency.

How it works

The self-assessment has two sections. In the first section, you’ll work through a short series of questions covering four aspects of the software development process. This questionnaire should only take a few minutes of your time.

After you’ve completed the self-assessment component, your DES will be calculated.


After you receive your DES, you will also receive a further breakdown of the score, outlining how efficiently your team is operating across each section outlined during the assessment (i.e., Getting Started, Day to Day, Collaboration, Production).

Each section provides a series of recommendations based on the tools and techniques our VMware Tanzu Labs (formerly Pivotal Labs) delivery teams employ while working on creating new apps or modernizing legacy applications alongside our clients.

Within these recommendations you will find actionable tips, tools, and practices that your team can leverage to reduce friction along the development process, improve efficiency, and ultimately help foster a healthier team and working environment.

Note: No data collection form is required to take the assessment or get your results. The Development Efficiency Assessment tool does not store any of the questionnaire results and is 100 percent anonymous.

Try it today!

Try out the self-assessment for yourself and get your team’s Development Efficiency Score!

If you have any questions about the Development Efficiency Assessment tool or just need some hands-on help with improving your team’s development efficiency, book an hour with our Tanzu Labs team using our office hours to connect with a Tanzu Labs designer, engineer, and product manager. We’ll help you assess better ways to build new applications, modernize existing apps and portfolios, and implement DevSecOps best practices, so your teams can ship high-quality code to production faster and more frequently.

Additional resources

• Webinar: Building Healthy and Efficient Software Teams in 2023
• Blog post: Revamping Remote and Distributed Work at VMware Tanzu Labs
• Blog post: 6 Ways to Maximize Team Effectiveness Using Miro

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About the Author

Evan Prowse is a product marketing manager focusing on application services at VMware Tanzu Labs.