【分享】You get what you ask for(by Naresh Jain)

loveisbug 2011-08-27 02:17:29
You Get What You Measure

Naresh Jain Malad, Mumbai, India

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 have 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 were 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 dysfunctional teams, it turns out that the teams were measured using the wrong parameters. Hence the team adapted and optimized itself for those poorly chosen parameters. Lacking the understanding of the project's purpose or vision led to team members defining their own success criteria and measuring themselves against their own respective, disconnected, dysfunctional parameters. Incorrect measurement does more harm than good.

Good project managers ensure everyone on the team really understands what success means. They help build a common vision and shared understanding within the team. They encourage team collaboration by building win-win situations, so that each team member has the same focus and is working toward the common goals. They help the team identify what really needs to be measured. The secret sauce of successful projects is in using metrics as a means to an end and not as a deliverable in their own right.

I find if I try to measure 10 different things at once, it gets very confusing and distracting for the team. Limiting myself to measuring two or three parameters at a time, however, is very effective. These two to three parameters should be unanimously decided by the team based on current issues hurting the team or on risks that the team feels will impact them in near future.

Once the issue is resolved or the risk is mitigated, the team should remove the old checks and replace them with new items added to their metrics. A team which does not periodically change its metrics is symptomatic of a bigger problem.

Be sure what you are measuring is of value, and that may change during the project. You get what you measure, so be sure you are measuring the right things.

原文地址:http://pm.97things.oreilly.com/wiki/index.php/You_get_what_you_ask_for
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The idea for this book started with a call from Prof. P. C. P. Bhatt, whom Naresh has known for over a decade. Prof. Bhatt is the author of a widely used Operating Systems book, which is in its 5th edition in India. He asked Naresh to collaborate on his next edition, but Naresh’s expertise is in Cloud Computing, on which he had taught a graduate class at Santa Clara University in California. Thus, a new book was conceived. Cloud has evolved as the next natural step after Internet, connecting mainframe like centralized computing capabilities in a data center with many handheld and distributed devices on the other end. Thus, computing has taken the form of exercise dumbbell equipment, with Servers on one end and Clients on the other, joined by the fat pipes of communication in between. Furthermore, it has trans- formed the way computing happens, which for both authors started by carrying decks of JCL (Job Control Language) cards for feeding an IBM mainframe, cul- minated with collaboration for this book using the Cloud. This is amazing, espe- cially considering that even a smartphone has more memory and compute than was present on the entire Saturn V rocket that carried astronauts to the Moon and back. This implies that more such miracles are on the way, enabled by widely and cheaply available compute power made possible by Cloud Computing. Objective of this book is to give an exposure to the shift in paradigm caused by Cloud Computing and unravel the mystery surrounding basic concepts including performance and security. This book is aimed at teaching IT students, and enabling new practitioners with hands-on projects, such as setting a Web site and a blog. Focus areas include Best Practices for using Dynamic Cloud Infrastructure, Cloud Operations Management, and Security.

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