Developer Metrics
The team I’m on has come up with some interesting metrics to gauge “progress”. Here’s a description of the four we currently use:
- Breaking the Build: This is simple. You break the build, you get a bowling pin on your desk until you fix it.
- Coffee Pot: If you do something that’s so stupid (i.e. checking in a test project, creating classes that are completely “wrong”) and the entire team agrees on the stupid-ness of said act, that developer gets a “coffee pot” on their desk, literally, because they need the caffiene to wake up and stop doing stupid things.
- Excuse Train: “Yeah, the reason the build broke is I didn’t completely understand the new design of these classes, and my brain hasn’t woken up yet, and … “ … what, is that the sound of the Excuse Train pulling in? We don’t have anything to put on a developer’s desk yet to symbolize this, but I’m thinking of a Thomas the Train toy.
- Whining Without Cheese: If you whine, you get this. Like the Excuse Train, we don’t have anything to symbolize this yet … maybe an empty wine bottle?
While we do have these “metrics”, they’re done mostly for comedic effect. Not that breaking the build is a funny thing, but it does bring an extra dimension of humor to the project. We’re also going to tally occurrences of these events on our whiteboard for future reference, and yes, that let to a quick database design (along with a simple WinForm app idea - neither of which we’ve implemented yet - we need stories for that) so we can do all sorts of fun graphs.
Published: 06.26.2007 11:43:39 AM CST