Wherever You Go, There You Are

Performance management textbooks will tell you that workers don't improve unless they get feedback. Joe Widgetmaker should get a nice chart, updated daily, of how many widgets he has produced personally each day, and how many have been built by his team.

Consider the average working programmer's life:

• surfing USENET
• surfing Slashdot
• reading docs
• questioning colleagues
• writing specs and designs
• writing docs
• writing code
• testing code
• fixing bugs
• filing bug reports on others' code
• attending meetings
• helping sales and marketing staff

(For comparison to the grad student life, see http://philip.greenspun.com/humor/graduate-student-emotion-check-list.)

Characterizing this person's productivity is going to require more than one number. But if we don't do it, days or weeks could slip by without the programmer realizing that his or her achievement levels are plummeting. In a company with disorganized or technically clueless managers, the programmer's supervisory chain won't notice the lack of achievement either.

Production of documentation and code is generally measurable by reference to the company's version control system. Bugs filed and fixed are easily tallied by looking at the company's ticket/bug tracking system (see http://www.arsdigita.com/doc/ticket for a description of our favorite open-source ticket/bug tracker). The softer stuff can still be quantified but it will have to be done by humans filling out forms.

Ideally the programmer will get daily feedback, which is kept private unless the individual elects to publicize it. Performance in each sanctioned area of activity will be marked up and scored with a weight. The programmer can then see if his or her crude achievement level is going up or down.

Summary

Building and managing a peak-performing software engineering organization is challenging but extremely profitable. The core Ariba product was written by two programmers, yielding a market capitalization of $30 billion. Microsoft Internet Explorer is a much better browser than Netscape Navigator and yet it was written by a much smaller team: only about 30 developers.

Start by attracting a good core team, perhaps by setting up an organization that enables each engineer to excel along the axes defined in http://www.arsdigita.com/asj/professionalism. Provide a productive working environment and a physical environment that is better than the average programmer's house. Provide daily positive reinforcement. Provide daily feedback showing the programmer more or less exactly what he or she has accomplished, plus a graph for the preceding few months showing the trend. Aim to install a feeling of ownership in each worker.

More

• Bringing out the Best in People (Aubrey Daniels 1999; McGraw Hill). 200 pages containing 75 pages of good ideas plus the usual business book filler. But the ideas are genuinely good.
• The Mythical Man-Month (Fred Brooks 1995)
• Managing the Professional Service Firm (David Maister 1993). In terms of having an equal distribution of ability among all levels of the enterprise, the closest industry to software engineering is management consulting. Maister's work is a classic guide to success in this industry.
• "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments", Justin Kruger and David Dunning 1999, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
• Peopleware (Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister 1999); page 98 is worth the price of admission, explaining that "the term unprofessional is often used to characterize surprising and threatening behavior. ... In a healthier organization culture, people are thought to be professional to the extent they are knowledgeable and competent." (See http://www.arsdigita.com/asj/professionalism for ArsDigita's independent conception of this idea.) Much of the rest of the book is a celebration of the 40-hour work week and the claim that "overtime" in the long run is never beneficial. If the authors were correct, Silicon Valley would be the poorest region of the nation, with Redmond, Washington the 2nd most impoverished. And Washington, DC would be our great source of innovation and productivity. Peopleware was probably written to help ensure success for internal corporate IT projects where there isn't any competition and delivering three months late won't change much.
• Making the Cisco Connection : The Story Behind the Real Internet Superpower (Bunnel et al 2000) -- shows how ignoring the "no overtime" admonitions in Peopleware can generate $400 billion in market cap.
• Parkinson's Law (C. Northcote Parkinson 1958) -- how management really works in the long run
• A Pattern Language (Christopher Alexander et al 1977) has very interesting things to say about physical space and social organization.