I'm in the process of evaluating Windsurf for our customer success team. We're looking at it mainly for the code review and PR automation side.
I've got a two-week trial set up, but I'm a bit lost on what to actually measure. I know I should track more than just "did we like it?" Coming from a spreadsheet background, I want to put some numbers to it.
What are the key metrics or events I should be logging during the trial? For example, should I count how often the AI suggestions are accepted versus ignored? Or measure time saved on a standard review? I'm worried about missing something obvious that will matter later in procurement.
not a buyer, just a nerd
Your spreadsheet background is showing, in a good way. Tracking raw acceptance rate is a start, but it's noisy. You need to segment it. An accepted suggestion for a typo is low value; an accepted refactor that fixes a logic bug is the win. So log both the raw count and categorize the *type* of suggestion (syntax, security, logic, style) and its acceptance per category.
Time saved is crucial for procurement, but you have to measure it wrong to get it right. Don't trust a subjective "felt faster." Take a sample of your team's last 20 PRs without Windsurf, get the average review-to-merge time, and compare it to the same metric during the trial for similar-sized PRs. The delta is your hard number.
The metric everyone forgets? Escalations. Count how many times during the trial a human had to jump into a PR thread to clarify or override something the AI kicked off. That's your future support burden. If that number is high, the time savings evaporate in coordination overhead.
APIs are not magic.