If your engineers care about quality-and you shouldn’t hire any who don’t-they know they’re doing inferior work, and their morale will further plummet. You’ll find more technical debt, problems with scaling, and disconnects between the desired user experience and the implemented code. You’ll find few or no automated tests, little refactoring, and lots of hacks. #No umbrellas allowed developer codeLook closer still and you’ll almost certainly find that the quality of their code is suffering, and the potential value of their solutions is suppressed. The metrics look great, but the morale is terrible. Bleary-eyed and carpal tunneled, they’re treated like and feeling like commoditized robots, automatons assembling code along an endless line. They’re tired, burnt out, miss their friends and families, and aren’t even clear on the value of what they’re creating. The metrics are great, the team is clearly killing it, and the product owner can report excellent progress to their stakeholders.īut then you look a little closer and discover that this team has been hitting those numbers by working a string of 60-hour weeks. An engineering team is consistently knocking out 20 tickets in each sprint. Managing metrics is inefficient and ineffectiveĬonsider a fairly trivial example. #No umbrellas allowed developer softwareįor truly valuable software solutions developed by effective engineering teams, leaders should instead be managing morale, developer satisfaction, and team focus, then trust in these to drive efficiency, quality, and a company culture in which everyone can thrive. When metrics lead-when story points dictate where developers must follow-they actually get in the way of teams’ ability to innovate, create, and solve meaningful problems. Metrics have their place, but they should follow where teams lead, in order to quantify the quality and worth of the solutions they’re creating. The problem is that so many of these numbers are nonsense, and even the valid measures don’t work well as management tools. The numbers are going up! So something valuable must be happening, right? While they may not understand the esoteric subtleties of refactoring to improve readability and conciseness, they can appreciate when code coverage increases from 85% to 90%. The business leaders who hire engineering firms such as mine like to see the numbers, the metrics that claim to quantify the value we create.
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