Real Developers Don’t Do Status Reports
Real developers write code — not status reports.
I Need It
There are typically 2 reasons for needing status reports: 1) collaboration and 2) monitoring.
Agile shops recommend status reports for the first reason. Software development is a team sport. Rarely do individuals work in a vacuum, so regular status is important to address dependencies, remove blocks, and ensure folks don’t step on each other’s toes. The manager may collect reports for logistical reasons, but the reports aren’t for managers — they are for the team.
Monitoring is more common in consulting arrangements. Work is being done on someone else’s behalf and that person wants to monitor the activities. Very simply they want to ensure they getting what they are paying for. Every once in a while you read about dysfunctional uses of status reports. This “use case” is commonly the scenario where that’s found. The reason is that people often don’t care until there is a problem. Then the reports are reviewed to help understand where things went wrong.
Best of Both Worlds
I like having status reports ( for reason 1 ), but I hate writing them.
So I generate them. One of the original aspects of the vision for 6th Sense was that we could generate status reports. While we’ve had a few attempts in the past, our current Status Report ( newly updated last Friday ) is very compelling. It can be run for any period of time. I have mine automatically emailed to me each day with the previous day’s report. It contains:
- Tickets I closed
- Check-ins — including total time spent on the change, gross churn, and how long ( in days ) it was open.
- Breakdown of my day’s activities by category ( Development, Email, etc )
- Top 20 files I worked on by time
- Tickets that I’ve delivered some work against but at still open
It’s inspired by a Scrum stand-up meeting and answers the question, “What did I do?”. Of course this report leverages our integrations not only with the desktop development tools but with task tracking and source-code control systems. If you are a team ( or individual ) that either has to or wants to have status reports and doesn’t want to write them, call us and generate them. It really is that simple.
Here’s an example status report as generated by the system. Enjoy…
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