Performance Metrics: Something to be Gamed? Part 2
This post is a continuation of my earlier post.Quoting Austin
Joel quotes Robert Austin quite a bit in order to support his position that performance measurement is inherently bad. Austin is the author of the book Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations. He is often referenced by those who are making this same argument � that performance measurement drives organizational dysfunction. (By way of full discloser, Dr. Austin is a member of the 6th Sense Technical Advisory Board). What everyone usually fails to mention is that Austin differentiates measurement in his book into two distinct parts: motivational and informational measurement. Motivational measurement is focused towards performance rewards, recognition, and controlling behavior. It�s clearly the type of measurement that Joel is opposed to. However, in his opposition, he includes informational measurement in the same category, and it�s not!
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Managing Success in Offshore Software Development
Contrary to conventional belief that complex processes should be kept onshore, software development is rapidly gaining favor as an outsource candidate. This according to a new study by Duke University and Booz Allen Hamilton. But as the pattern of offshoring moves from low- to high-end work, the challenges faced by management shifts from dealing with political and cultural issues to more operational issues like retaining managerial control and gaining operational efficiency. When high-end functions are sent offshore, they're put at significant risk. Offshoring introduces new physical, temporal, cultural, communication and organizational barriers that can wreak havok on software development. But properly conceived and executed metrics programs can help organizations reclaim the visibility and control they lose when projects exit their four walls. This is the thesis of a new whitepaper by 6th Sense, "Managing Success in Offshore Software Development: A Framework for Reclaiming Visibility and Control." This paper lends perspective on the challenges faced in offshore software development and provides a context for considering a metrics program as a risk management foundation for your offshore projects. Metrics matter whether you're an organization sending your projects offshore or an outsourcer seeking new ways to differentiate and win customer loyality. After all, you can't manage what you can't measure. And management matters more than ever when your high-end processes leave the building.Performance Metrics – Something to be Gamed? Part 1
In a recent post on Joel on Software, Joel wrote passionately about management consultants and their tendency to focus on performance metrics when analyzing software organizations. Simply put, he doesn't think that technical team performance can be effectively measured. In fact, he referenced a previous post from 2002 on the same subject–so this is a relatively long held belief on his part. Here's a snippet to share some of his thoughts:
Software organizations tend to reward programmers who (a) write lots of code and (b) fix lots of bugs. The best way to get ahead in an organization like this is to check in lots of buggy code and fix it all, rather than taking the extra time to get it right in the first place. When you try to fix this problem by penalizing programmers for creating bugs, you create a perverse incentive for them to hide their bugs or not tell the testers about new code they wrote in hopes that fewer bugs will be found. You can't win.
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6th Sense Analytics Offers Solution To Open Source Projects and Academic Groups Free of Charge
MORRISVILLE, NC -- December 12, 2006 -- 6th Sense Analytics, a pioneer in improving software development metrics, today announced it will make its software solution available to academic groups and open source projects free of charge. By assisting these groups through automated collection of activity-based data, 6th Sense will actively support the academic study of software engineering and help open source projects to demonstrate progress, value and differentiation.
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Responses to Flat World Webcast Questions, Part 2
This next set of responses comes from Flat World panelist Tom Koulopolous, founder of Delphi Group, managing director of Perot Systems Innovation Labs, and author of Smartsourcing.
- How do you measure the effects of virtual distance in flat world software development?
- Metrics are one thing but what about the actual practicalities of managing a globally distributed software development (particularly given the observations on non-verbal communication etc)?
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Responses to Flat World Webcast Questions, Part 1
The online panel discussion, "Building Software in a Flat World," stimulated a tremendous number of questions from the audience. Some were answered as part of the panel discussion. Others that we could not cover will be answered right here, front and center, for all eyes to see. This first set of questions are answered by 6th Sense Analytics co-founder and CEO, Greg Burnell.
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Don’t Ignore Your Career, continued
Continued from this post...
The execution section of Fowler's book is about day-to-day activity—how you're delivering value to yourself, your team and your projects. The emphasis here should be at the team and project level. Fowler suggests that sometimes we get wrapped up in ourselves and expect everything to revolve around us, which can cause our overall performance to decline. Instead we should be focusing on the quality of our job and deliverable—daily. Loving what we do, even the maintenance or drudge work, and truly embracing our profession. What a concept!
Other good points he makes relate to not burning ourselves out with overtime and learning to say "No" more often, and learning how to fail. Failure implies that we're stretching ourselves and taking risk—that we're trying to do things outside of our comfort zone and that with each failure comes a later, more experienced success.
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Don’t Ignore Your Career!
Despite the quirky title, Chad Fowler has written an essential read for today's developer:
My Job Went to India (And All I Got Was This Lousy Book) 52 Ways to Save Your Job
Fowler's book is a Call to Arms for software developers about what it takes to succeed in a flat world in which technical skills are globally transferable. He attacks the complacency that I see so frequently in software teams complacency that surfaces in engineers who think that their contributions and their value will always be self-evident. He points out a potentially fatal blind spot in the developer community: an unwillingness or lack of recognition for the need to continuously change, evolve and expand their skills. Today's professional developer must have the deep skills of a specialist, together with the breadth and soft skills of a business generalist. The combination is compelling, powerful and utterly differentiated. And it is the future.
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Modernizing distributed AD with metrics
The debate about sending IT work overseas has moved out of the political arena and turned into economic and structural discussion. This piece from IT News crystallizes that debate by talking about some of the mistakes organizations make outsourcing and some of the common challenges.
Outsourcing typically goes wrong when delays occur, you get poor-quality programming, and support and operational costs increase. These problems crop up when there’s a lack of skills, planning or infrastructure to manage the outsourcing relationship.
This paragraph in particular stood out:
“Most companies looking to outsourcing or distributed development continue to have unrealistic expectations or insufficient processes and infrastructure to adapt to this new development paradigm. Many simply adopt inefficient manual processes (e.g. more meetings, more travel) to manage the challenges of distribution, or turn away from the problem altogether, unable to see a viable, short-term solution to solve the pains of distributed development.”
That’s important because it gets to the heart of the issue: innovation.
6th Sense’s hosted an online debate this week on building software in a flat world. Among the points raised… the need to innovate and add modern practices to a discipline that’s hardly changed for decades.
Metrics are a vital component of any modern process because they help you establish a real-world infrastructure to manage outsourced projects. Metrics that are captured at the developers’ desktop in particular are the key to progress. They let you know what’s really going, so you can conduct due diligence on your current infrastructure and establish metrics to manage the new relationship.
As Delphi Group founder and Smartsourcing author Thomas Koulopoulos said during our web cast, these are early days for taking this modern approach, but things are clearly changing. Koulopoulos characterized it as the birth of printing: “We are at the very beginning of making a true science of application development and automation technology. We like to think we are much further along - [however] we are at the stage where Gutenberg invented the press rather then Heidelberg mass presses,” Koulopoulos said. Bring on the industrial revolution.
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