Codermetrics

Timeout for an Example: Metrics and the Skeptic

The grizzled, seasoned coder on our team gave me that look. Just a little eyebrow raise and a smirk. Sure, that look said, go ahead and tell these young guys about metrics, and how they are going to help us improve as a team. I won’t spoil it, his silence foretold, I won’t say anything, but his raised chin let me knew that he wasn’t buying it. He was a skeptic.

One month passed. We had a team meeting, and I showed everyone a set of company and product metrics. It showed how our product was doing, how we compared to the competition (as far as we knew), and how individual features were being received. We focused on the features we had implemented in the last six months. Everyone was very engaged. It was the liveliest team meeting we’d had the whole year. Our grizzled coder even made a couple of comments.

Another month passed. We had another team meeting. This time we looked at updates of company and product metrics, but we also looked at team metrics taken from our recent sprints (we used agile methodology so we worked in incremental “sprints”). We had just released a new feature. We speculated about how our team metrics might correlate to the reception of the new feature and which metrics we thought might be significant and why. The grizzled coder said the complexity of the work that we did on the feature in the final sprint probably was too high, that he expected our testing probably had missed issues, and so we would probably see a ...