Taking the Time to Pause & Think
In 2001, Anna Allison coined the term Metrics Analysis Questions or MAQ’s in an article in STQE (now Better Software) magazine. MAQ’s fit quite nicely into the Explore – Discover – Adjust model in that they can guide your thinking as you explore the data.
In essence, MAQ’s are simply lists of predefined questions. You can also think of them as heuristics that guide your exploration and discovery activities. There are two important aspects to MAQ questions.
First, they help ensure that you don’t overreact to superficial aspects of the data. Instead, they drive you to deeper and broader analysis. Instead of looking for a specific conclusion based upon specific details, you’re looking for meaningful trends and patterns.
Second, they are tailored to your environment – your team, projects, and technology dynamics and historical performance patterns. You build them over time as you make important observations and learn the true nuance of your team and project performance.
Let me give you an example for MAQ usage. Let’s say you notice that Active “productive” Time has declined within a specific project team over the past 2 weeks. Instead of reacting to that specific event, you might want to use the following MAQ’s to get closer to the root cause:
- Are there any active team personal actions that would explain it (vacations, illness, training sessions)?
- Has there been an increase in corporate or overhead activity (increase in meetings, corporate events, benefits sign-up, all hand meetings, etc.)?
- Review trending from a longer term view (zoom out). Is this is part of a cyclical pattern – perhaps related to normal development methodologies?
- Look deeper at individual performance (zoom in). Is this related to a specific team member? Perhaps look into how they may be struggling. Is this expected – or is something else going on?
- Compare the results to the project schedule and planned activities / deliverables. Is this expected – or are the results surprising?
- Along those same lines, is another project having an influence? One starting up or is another project pulling in more resources then planned.
As you can see, MAQ’s require no rocket science. They’re simple questions or heuristics that remind us to examine the surrounding situation so that we correctly interpret the data. Oft-times they lead to further questions and analysis.
What I really like about them is that they cause me to pause and think – so that I don’t overreact to the data after an initial glance. Something you never want to do with this level of insight into the inner workings of software teams.
Next topics discussion:
We’ll more deeply explore the “Adjust” part of the model, which is probably the most challenging aspect…
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