Engineering 360 Dashboard: Transforming Complex Data into Powerful Engineering Insights

By Shiva Nimmagadda, Alex Hu, Venkad Dhandapani, and Srini Linga.

In our ‘Engineering Energizers’ Q&A series, we explore the paths of successful engineering leaders. Today, we spotlight Shiva Nimmagadda, Senior Director of Software Engineering at Salesforce, who spearheads the Engineering 360 Dashboard — a comprehensive platform facilitating actionable insights and data-driven decisions across all of Salesforce’s engineering operations.

Explore how Shiva’s Dashboard team tackled developer productivity challenges by leveraging Data Cloud, integrated with other tools to maintain consistent metrics, and employed strategies to overcome scalability and security hurdles while swiftly deploying new features.

What is the Engineering 360 Dashboard’s mission?

It provides actionable insights and facilitates data-driven decisions across all of Salesforce’s engineering operations. Its purpose includes measuring and enhancing developer productivity, promoting agile practices, and upholding high product availability, quality and security standards. By offering a unified, holistic view of engineering operations, Engineering 360 Dashboard enables leaders and teams to access, analyze, and utilize data for informed decision-making.

The Dashboard integrates smoothly with Salesforce’s tools like Data Cloud, Tableau, MuleSoft, Agentforce and Einstein 1 Platform, forming a robust platform for generating insights. This integration eliminates data silos and ensures consistent metrics and definitions across teams. With predictive analytics and prescriptive recommendations, engineering leaders can swiftly identify obstacles, track key performance indicators, and take action on insights that drive continuous growth and improvement.

Srini Linga, Senior Director of Software Engineering and an avid user of the Engineering 360 Dashboard, shares how the tool has enhanced his team’s collaboration and productivity.

What was the most significant technical challenge your team faced when developing the Engineering 360 Dashboard?

The primary challenge was that data was scattered across numerous siloed systems. To provide engineers with a comprehensive 360-degree view, it was essential to liberate this data and unify engineers’ identities into a single system. Additionally, accurately tracking and attributing contributions within a constantly evolving organization added complexity. Frequent reorganizations made it difficult to maintain consistent data and ensure that metrics accurately reflected actual contributions.

To tackle this, the team leveraged Data Cloud, which supports complex data transformations and handles large volumes of historical data. Using Data Cloud’s ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) capabilities, the team created a data model that mapped organizational changes and maintained consistency over time. This robust model allowed the Dashboard to track historical data and account for shifting roles and teams.

Additionally, the team integrated this data into Tableau for visualization and employed batch processing to manage the vast number of records. This combination ensured the system dynamically adapted to requirements and maintained accuracy. This solution was crucial for preserving a reliable, standardized set of metrics as the organization evolved.

How do you manage challenges related to scalability in the Engineering 360 Dashboard?

Scalability posed a significant challenge during the development of the Engineering 360 Dashboard, as it needed to manage tremendous amounts of data without sacrificing performance. The team turned to Data Cloud to handle data ingestion and processing, and migrated from an on-premises Tableau Server to Tableau Cloud. This move eliminated hardware constraints and provided the necessary infrastructure to support growing data volumes and concurrent users.

To enhance performance, the team employed advanced data modeling techniques and crafted efficient data queries that minimized resource usage. They also implemented performance monitoring and load balancing strategies to keep the system responsive under heavy demand. These efforts enabled the Engineering 360 Dashboard to manage up to 90 billion records while maintaining quick response times and a seamless user experience, even as Salesforce’s engineering organization expanded.

The Engineering 360 Dashboard delivers unprecedented data insights and intelligence for Salesforce engineers.

What ongoing research and development efforts are aimed at improving the Engineering 360 Dashboard’s capabilities?

Our team is constantly improving the platform by integrating new technologies like AI and machine learning. One primary focus is the addition of generative AI and natural language processing (NLP) capabilities, which analyze unstructured data from engineering documentation and team discussions. This analysis helps link unstructured insights with structured metrics, offering a more comprehensive view of engineering .

Another key area is anomaly detection to identify unusual patterns in developer productivity or project timelines. By examining these anomalies, the Dashboard can provide early alerts about potential delays or performance issues. The team also aims to expand data integration, incorporating additional engineering datasets such as security, compliance, and agile excellence to create a complete performance overview.

These research and development efforts ensure the Dashboard evolves with Salesforce’s engineering needs, maintaining its position as a leading tool for engineering analytics.

Srini explains how his team used the Dashboard’s metrics to improve their productivity by more than 50%.

How do you balance the need for Engineering 360 Dashboard’s rapid deployment with maintaining high standards of trust and security?

The team uses a structured agile methodology that enables rapid deployment while upholding trust and security. New features are developed and released monthly, following a bi-weekly sprint cycle. In the first half of each month, the team concentrates on feature development, followed by a rigorous testing phase. Features undergo thorough testing, validation, and pilot testing with a select group of users before being rolled out to the broader engineering organization.

Additionally, the team prioritizes Trust above all else, investing heavily in observability. They focus on dashboard availability, supportability, data quality, data freshness, and data latencies. This emphasis on Trust and proactive issue management, combined with clear visibility into the entire data pipeline and visualization sets, enables engineers to confidently rely on the data presented in dashboards.

Security reviews are integrated into the development cycle, with the team collaborating closely with Salesforce’s security specialists to identify and address potential risks. This approach ensures the Dashboard can evolve quickly without sacrificing quality or security, maintaining Salesforce’s high standards while adapting to new needs

What strategies did your team employ to ensure that enhancements in one area of the Engineering 360 Dashboard did not compromise other areas?

The team implemented a layered architecture in Tableau, using shared features as common layers to avoid dependency issues across various dashboards and views. For more complex changes, separate feature branches were created to isolate enhancements and conduct extensive regression testing before merging them back into the main branch.

Additionally, automated testing and validation were employed to detect any unintended consequences early in the development cycle. Rigorous documentation processes were followed to outline potential impacts and mitigation strategies. This meticulous approach ensured that enhancements could be made confidently without compromising the stability or performance of other areas in the Dashboard.

How do you gather Engineering 360 Dashboard feedback from users, and how does it influence future development?

User feedback is collected through various channels, such as a dedicated Slack channel for pilot users, virtual meetings, and roadshow-style presentations. This approach allows the team to gather real-time insights and prioritize feedback based on its relevance and impact. Additionally, a support channel is maintained for users to report bugs or request enhancements.

Feedback is meticulously documented, categorized, and prioritized to inform future development. Internal champions —experienced power users of the Dashboard — also play a crucial role by advocating for improvements and sharing best practices. Their input ensures that future development efforts are aligned with the broader needs of the engineering organization.