97 Things Every Project Manager Should Know

Chapter 55. You Get What You Measure

Naresh Jain

IT IS A WELL-KNOWN FACT that if you measure the wrong things, you encourage wrong behavior. Software teams suffer daily because their managers are tracking and measuring them against the wrong parameters.

For example, measuring how many hours someone works encourages team members to clock in longer hours. Studies show that working longer hours does not necessarily produce better results. In most cases, it actually results in poorer work quality.

Similarly, measuring and focusing on the team's velocity (amount of functionality completed by the team in a time span) encourages more work to be done faster, but does not necessarily ensure the most important/critical work is being chosen. Therefore, this approach does not solve the real business problem of completing software development both quickly and bug-free.

Focusing on how many bugs the testers report encourages the testers to report more bugs, but not necessarily to report issues with maximum business impact. If developers are measured based on how many bugs are filed against them, testers can become their enemy. This leads to unnecessary team tensions.

In my experience, more software, done faster, does not mean successful software. Rapid software development is good for getting feedback quickly, but building real products needs a lot more than just development speed.

Often when I visit ...