Software Engineering Insights Solutions

Software Engineering Insights Solutions is the planned name of a category that has already lived under one other name. Forrester's last scorecard of this space was the Value Stream Management Wave of Q4 2022. The research now moving toward publication goes by software engineering insights, announced so far only as an expansion of coverage by senior analyst Andrew Cornwall in December 2025. No Wave under the new name is published yet. The flag is right this time. And the gap between the old name and the new one is the entire story of this market.

The old name, value stream management, was built for executives: the flow of value across application delivery, metrics for product planners and operational leaders. The new name is built for the people being measured. Cornwall's preview blog puts the mechanism plainly. VSM "appeals to leaders," but "the term itself does not resonate with developers." A category that measures software teams had to be renamed toward the teams. The planned evaluation inherits that tension, and it is the tension that will decide what the scorecard is worth.

The last scorecard under the old name

The predecessor is The Forrester Wave: Value Stream Management, Q4 2022, and it established the field the planned evaluation will re-score.

Fourteen vendors, twenty five criteria. The report named three Leaders, of which Digital.ai is publicly confirmed, cited for the highest possible scores in end-user experience, product vision, and innovation roadmap, a top-five strategy finish, and the second-highest current-offering score. "Digital.ai's dashboard gives a comprehensive view of the value stream," Forrester wrote. Jellyfish was named a Strong Performer in its first year in the Wave and, per its own account, "spiked in strategy." The preceding Value Stream Management Landscape, Q3 2022, published July 28, 2022, listed ConnectALL as a key vendor with a standalone product.

That scorecard is now four years old, and the market it described has moved twice. First, the standalone metrics vendors absorbed the VSM idea. Cornwall's December 2025 blog says it directly: standalone software engineering insights platforms now "find themselves doing value stream management," which extends beyond the software development lifecycle. Second, the field consolidated. Tasktop, a VSM pioneer, went to Planview. Pluralsight Flow, born as GitPrime, changed hands to Appfire in 2024. The last Wave scored the flow of value. The planned one will score the people in the flow.

The preview Forrester has published

The only first-party preview of the planned evaluation is a blog post, and its title is the thesis: "Wielding The Double-Edged Sword Of Software Engineering Insights."

Cornwall's history of the market is compact and worth quoting in shape. Early metrics used lines of code as a productivity proxy. Then platforms arrived from four different angles, each its own theory of what a team needs to see: Swarmia "lets you see work in progress at a glance and know where time really goes." LinearB "offers to provide instant visibility into your work-from-home development teams." DX "brings a developer experience perspective." Jellyfish "focuses on developer productivity and aligning engineering with business." Four vendors by name, four different theories of what an engineering team needs to see.

Two observations from the preview matter most. Many of these platforms adopted behavioral economics techniques for "nudging people toward the right decision." And the AI bubble, plus a tighter economy, is pushing leaders to ask whether AI-assisted development is worth the cost at all. That question is what revived interest in this category. The planned Wave will be written in the shadow of it.

The sword's second edge

Here is the honest limitation of this category before it even has a scorecard: the thing it sells can kill what it measures.

Cornwall's own related research carries the warning in its title: "Your Focus On Developer Productivity Is Killing You." The category sells visibility, and visibility has a second edge. A metrics platform can surface bottlenecks. It can also become the instrument through which a team is ranked, compared, and gamed. The preview blog says so without euphemism when it names misapplied metrics as one of the risks reviving SEI interest. The nudging language deserves attention too. Nudging is a polite word for steering, and steering is a loaded word in engineering organizations.

A planned Wave for this market will have to rank vendors on a capability whose misuse is the industry's best-documented failure mode. That is not a reason to skip the evaluation when it lands. It is a reason to read it for what it refuses to measure: whether a platform protects individual developers from the dashboards it builds for their managers. The old Wave scored flow. The new one must somehow score trust.

The field that will be scored

The probable field is already visible, and it breaks into three theories of measurement.

The flow vendors measure the delivery pipeline: cycle time, throughput, what is stuck and where. Swarmia and LinearB sit here, along with names like Code Climate Velocity and Sleuth. The business-alignment vendors measure effort against value: Jellyfish maps engineering work to business initiatives and investment allocation. The experience vendors measure the humans: DX, built by the researchers behind the SPACE framework, combines system data with structured developer surveys. Pluralsight Flow, under Appfire, still sells the learning-plus-productivity angle it inherited from GitPrime.

Any planned evaluation must place these three theories on one axis, and the criteria problem is obvious before the report exists. Cycle time is a fact. Business value is a judgment. Developer experience is a survey. A scorecard that mixes the three is ranking facts, judgments, and opinions in the same column. Watch for how Forrester solves that when the Wave publishes, because the solution will define the category.

What to watch while the Wave is pending

Three signals will tell you what the planned evaluation will actually score.

First, the AI question. Forrester's own preview says leaders are asking whether AI-assisted development is worth the cost. No public platform in this field has a settled answer, and the planned criteria will have to invent one: AI adoption, acceptance rates, impact per dollar. A vendor that ships AI-impact measurement before the Wave publishes is writing the criteria for its competitors.

Second, the privacy axis. Swarmia's model keeps individual data private to the team. Jellyfish's model is the boardroom view. The planned Wave will reveal, by its criteria, which audience Forrester thinks the category serves. That choice will be worth more than any tier.

Third, the consolidation clock. This field acquired its pioneers before it got its second scorecard, Tasktop and Flow and the rest. Whoever leads the planned Wave will be leading a market that is still being bought and sold underneath them.

Three questions before the scorecard exists

One: who sees the numbers? Decide the audience before the tool. A platform bought for the boardroom and pointed at individual developers is a weapon. A platform bought for teams and pointed at the board is a projector. The planned Wave will rank both kinds in one column, so settle your answer first.

Two: which predecessor describes your problem? If you need portfolio-level value flow across the delivery pipeline, the Q4 2022 VSM criteria still describe you better than the coming name does. If you need to know where engineering time actually goes, wait for the new scorecard. The rename was not cosmetic. The two names measure different things.

Three: how will you know AI paid for itself? Forrester is already framing the category around this question. Ask every shortlisted vendor to show their AI-impact metrics today, not on a roadmap slide. The vendors that can answer are the ones the planned criteria will reward.

One of the delivery-pipeline activities this category measures is scored on its own terms in Continuous Automation And Testing Services, a category where the product is people rather than software, and the newest scorecard tracks how aggressively those people are automating the labor they used to sell by the hour.

Forrester does not endorse any vendor named here, and tier placement should not be read as a recommendation to buy.