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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