Codermetrics

Personnel

Players make the team. As has often been observed in professional sports, there are no great teams without great players. Coaches and managers may help bring out the best in players and help them work well together, but it’s the players themselves, the individual team members, who must do the work, solve the problems, and achieve the goals.

The most important part of any software development team, therefore, are the coders, the personnel. This section covers a set of techniques and concepts for using metrics to help you get the best personnel possible to fit your team goals and team needs.

Recruit for Comps

In the section on team profiles, the idea of “comps” was introduced. Through analysis of current or past performance, you can capture profiles that describe a team’s key characteristics. You can then use profiles as “comps” when analyzing an existing team or planning a new team.

You can also create “profiles” for coder roles and use those as “comps” when recruiting new coders. You can create profiles of existing coders from their average metrics, then these profiles can be broken down by roles as defined in the previous section. For example, you might develop a profile for a scorer and another for a defensive stopper by gathering metrics for coders who fill those roles on an existing team. Table 8-4 shows an example of role-based metric profiles, and Figure 8-8 shows a set of charts comparing the core metrics in those profiles.

Table 8-4. Metrics-based profiles of coder ...