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by jusob
2444 days ago
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I was in a company that did Agile well (my first time using it). Team velocity was never used to measure the output of the team, only to better predict how much work we could fit in a sprint. The other big think was that they saw Agile as a framework, each team was free to do a different "implementation" and use different tools. Team velociyy had different units in different team and couldn't be compared. |
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Eventually, things changed, but for a while there it was awesome. Things got done well, in reasonable amounts of time, with a lot of attention to quality work.
I think the beginning of the end was probably around the time when the company (a software development consultancy) started using fine-grained hourly measures of time pre-sold to clients. This started happening around the time investors in certain clients got more involved in trying to dictate company policy, and I'm pretty sure it was all part of an attempt by investors to ensure there were "better metrics" for evaluating their investments.
You can't measure something without it directly affecting the measured thing's state. In this case, it started having detrimental effects on almost everything. Previously happy and productive devs started burning out, mediocre devs became new management favorites, more bugs got into production, projects suffered under less and less reasonable goals (including at one point my task effectively being to solve one of the Hard Problems of software dev -- cache invalidation), and so on.
In the US, management culture seems to have a monomaniacal focus on metrics. (I'd say "simplistic metrics", but the way they use them guarantees they're always simplistic.) This is driven, in part, by bureaucratization, which is in turn driven by a bunch of other things (mostly stemming from politics, directly or indirectly) in our business culture. Many managers would complain that without metrics they can't evaluate team productivity, individual value to the organization, and other important stuff, and they're right. The solution is not to double down on those metrics obsessions, though; it's to replace those managers with managers who are capable of effective, qualitative evaluation, instead of the almost purely quantitative approach that holds the high ground.