Managers like metrics as a result of it offers them a (seemingly) goal option to measure the efficiency of their folks and reward/right them. There are higher methods to reward or right efficiency.
As an train in selecting metrics for measuring your staff members, ask your self this: “How can this metric be gamed?” If somebody can acquire financially from gaming a metric, will probably be gamed.
You also needs to ask your self why you need to carry out such a activity within the first place. If you’re doing it to resolve who must get reduce out of your staff or obtain a tremendous bonus or increase, there are higher methods.
James Bach recommends managers stroll round within the developer pit and speak to folks, hearken to folks, and get a way of how the staff is functioning frequently. This may inform a supervisor extra about his folks’s efficiency than any stack-ranked arbitrary metric.
A metric that measures staff efficiency (builders and testers as a single staff) is an inventory of bugs reported by clients, sorted by launch. If the problem was discovered pre-production and never addressed, it nonetheless counts. This reveals the delta between what the shopper wished and what we thought they wished.
Since high administration likes to measure the cash, I’ve prior to now used a story-based metric to point out high administration how helpful my staff was. At increase/bonus time I might ballot the bug repository for all of the pressing points opened by every tester. I might hand the listing to every tester and have them guesstimate the worth of the highest 10 or so of every of their discovered points had they not been discovered. Worth can embody things like misplaced income, misplaced productiveness, defecting clients, lack of firm status, or anything that may be quantified in a greenback quantity. The greenback quantities had been added up by every tester and all the time exceeded their annual wage. The lists of bug IDs, titles and greenback quantities had been handed up the administration chain as an illustration of check staff members’ effectiveness.
There have been many estimations and assumptions that went into every line merchandise; I might assist them give you affordable assumptions. These had been obtainable to anybody who wished to problem the assumptions. No one ever did.