meta

One of the aspects of the new manager role I’m in at work is taking a shift in the rota of folks responsible for managing the releases of our internal software product — this week was my second time on the merry-go-round. It went better than the first time, largely because I’ve spent a fair chunk of time developing my own custom checklist for the process — and I’m happy I spent the time, because it made it significantly less painful and anxiety-inducing.

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meta

Yet another, yet another week.

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I’m building a little 11ty-based tool at work, to dynamically generate checklists to guide the release of a piece of software we build. I’m not going to say the release process is overly complicated or anything, but the current printed docs run to over 20 pages when printed out (lots of screenshots), and they’re generally at a level of “what” rather than “how” — there’s some room for improvement, let’s say.

read on for the problem i ran into, and how i solved it

I’m not sure if it’s because I’ve been closely following Agile is Anarchy, or some recent “how do we work” conversations at work, or what, but Monday morning this rant popped into my head, almost full blown, and what do I even have a blog for if not for posting rants about software development?

So, here’s the deal, just in case you’ve forgotten or were never told: pretty much every single way management tries to measure software team productivity is bullshit. You’re not measuring what you think you’re measuring, generally; what you are measuring is how good your dev team is at gaming your metrics. (Spoiler: they’re probably going to be extremely good, especially if they’re experienced.) I assume everybody has heard the “we paid bonuses for fixing bugs” story — or if you haven’t, you can probably extrapolate — but the key thing here is: almost every single thing you can measure, the devs can game.

so what does matter?

meta

Most of the work week was spent in a training about Agile methodologies in highly-regulated environments, and if you know what all those words mean when used in those particular combinations, you can probably guess how my week went. (On the plus side, I made a lot of progress on a little side-quest project that I otherwise probably wouldn’t have gotten to, so…)

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