Where you’re going or where you’ve been?
J. B. Rainsberger has a great blog entry titled Should We Measure Velocity on the importance of knowing where your team spends their time. He says knowing your history is more important than estimating new features.
It’s difficult to know where your development team is headed. Even with a perfect knowledge of how the team members work and how long it takes them to complete a feature, the specification often changes in the middle of a project. I’ve never finished a project with the original set of requirements.
So rather than stressing over imperfect estimations, he says focus on where you’ve been. Understanding where time was spent in the last product cycle lets you adjust where you’re going to spend time in the future.
But let me present it to you in his words.
Does your company value the areas where your software team spends its money? Do you know how to measure the value of what your team produces? How much money (time, energy, or actual cash) does your team spend on things no-one values? Could you pick three such wastes and eliminate them? What would you do with the recovered time, energy, or cash? How would you know that things got any better?
Of course, implicit in this decision is the ability to measure what your team is doing. Without a measure, you can’t detect waste. Later, without the measure, you can’t prove (or even see) the return on investment.
There are many ways to measure a developer’s day. Sometimes a great technical lead or manager can keep on top of things. Other companies have their developer’s guestimate their work at the end of the week.
But it’s hard to beat an automated solution for consistency. And that’s why we automatically gather data at Sixth Sense Analytics. Here’s an example what we can provide you today. From a daily diary report for each developer to a teamwide burn up chart, we’re already there. We’ve got an entire data warehousing solution backing up our product, so we can slice and dice the data any way you want it, from tool time to type of work (editing versus debugging?) to flow time.
Are you interested in measuring where your team has been? We can start there, then move forward to other interesting areas. Visit our FAQ page for more information.
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