Codermetrics

Timeout for an Example: The Turn-Around

One difficult challenge for any software development team is to turn things around when they are not going well. I am not talking about ill-conceived or competitively challenged software products, or software products that have simply not found their audience yet. I am also not talking about software development teams that are doing good work but that want to do better. What I am talking about here are specific situations where a software team is clearly struggling to meet goals, work well together, produce high-quality software, and meet its own or outsider expectations. These are the situations that need a real turn-around.

Those of us who have worked in the field for awhile know that sometimes software teams are judged unfairly. Expectations may be unreasonable, or faults of others (such as poor prioritizing) might be blamed on the software team. But in other cases there are legitimate situations where software teams are producing poor software, low quality software, or badly missing reasonable project dates. When a team is struggling, sometimes the members themselves don’t realize there is a problem, though sometimes they do.

Having worked in software development for nearly 30 years now, I have seen this situation a few times, and as a manager I’ve had to address situations like this more than once. I have come to the conclusion that codermetrics can be particularly valuable when you are trying to turn around a software development team. ...