Recognition for accomplishment is one of the motivator factors which drives our engagement. It is also the first factor with the lowest score calculated by employee engagement software in my organization after we formed new teams and get up to speed with engineering work. We were done with setting the most important SDLC processes and started delivering new products. The overall engagement score was 8.3 (59 employee net promoted score), but recognition was just 7.9. The comments gave us information about what people think and hints on what we can improve.

Comment 1

“You can do things just right and on time, or you can create a problem first and then fix it. I prefer to create high-quality solutions right away, but it seems I don’t have visibility as good as a person who does ‘rescue mission’, which is often fixing his own mistake.” …

Introduction

In the past I wrote an article about “The cost of software development and tips how to reduce it” where I was focusing on cost reduction tips in many aspects. This time, I tried to make the work done by teams of engineers observable, so that they could constantly self-improve. If we gather metrics we will be able to focus teams on the right improvements to get things done faster. Successful execution builds the trust of business partners and users, if we also know “How to make an impact with software”.

I’ve created the library called EngineeringMetrics to provide a flexible mechanism for building dashboard(s) from components designed to observe many dimensions of work. Data calculated once can be later published on the Confluence website (Jira Confluence macros are supported for dynamic data refresh). …

If you have ever worked in software product development you have probably asked yourself (or been asked by software engineers) the following questions:

• What is the strategy for the product?
• What is the link between user stories and the business goal?

The tactical view

Software development teams usually focus on the tactical view, looking at the user journey and feature descriptions. Then teams will break down the work backlog into epics and user stories, working on acceptance criteria and examples, prioritising work, planning releases and iterations. Then teams have daily coordination stand-up meetings, an iteration review session, and a retrospective meeting.

The greatest effort focuses on optimising the process of solution delivery, starting from requirements clarification and ending with product rollout. Even the fact that teams are often looking for feedback from the Product Owner and adjusting the backlog of work to reflect it, people tend to ask what is the strategy. …

A few days ago, I and several other development managers had a very interesting meeting with our guys from Finance. They were trying to understand how much money was being spent on any specific project. They were asking how do we measure development efficiency and effectiveness in terms of time, quality and cost and how utilisation is managed? They knew we are working in an Agile manner so they asked us if we knew what the cost of story point was, and whether this cost can be standardised for all teams? We discussed and agreed that story point means something different for each team, and even within the same team, the speed of development is continuously changing as we increase our experience in the teams. I started thinking that measuring costs per story point may create inflation in the estimation process due to the expected increase in the team’s performance. …