Measuring the process: how to gauge your team’s development success

Almost every enterprise within the software or application development world has acknowledged the need for metrics to measure the usability of their products. However, as a recent Baseline Magazine article points out, almost no one is measuring the development process itself, which means that our processes are largely untested, inefficient, and potentially wasteful. Up to this point, the only research most managers do into their team’s success is to walk through the bullpens once a day and ask, “How’s it going?” This isn’t because of a lack of desire or a belief that this type of information gathering is unimportant. As Forrester researcher Carey Schwaber told Baseline , “The common units to measure developer productivity are variable or inaccurate. The fundamental problem is that it’s difficult to size software.” In other words, the metrics for measuring the development process have not been standardized, tested, or scaled to the i...