I made this statement a few blog posts ago:

…they are not properly measuring the correct things in their standardized reporting (very valid and probably true, because figuring out what to measure is incredibly hard)

I wanted to talk more about this, because this is key. What SHOULD we be measuring? How can we be effective with those measurements?

This goes back to “I’m a software developer and my job is to write code. I want to be left alone as much as possible to write code but I also understand that my management and leadership need to see what I’m doing.” So with that above in mind, how can we create some sort of report that shows your leaders what you are working on?

One of the current industry common answers tends to revolve around Sprints, so the immediate thought is, “Which sprint tasks am I working on, and am I getting them done on time?” If you keep the Sprint board up to date then this is fine. Where this gets challenging, however, is ensuring that all the Sprint tasks are actually accurate, have proper definition of done/acceptance criteria, and have been properly scoped. You might be closing 100 story points a week (!!) and look super productive, but are those Sprint tasks written properly that it’s moving the project in the correct direction?

This also requires that the developer keeps the Sprint board up to date, and follows good development practices of implementing Sprint stories on a branch-by-branch basis. It also means you need to ensure all the odds and ends, like documentation, tests, and architecture diagrams, are updated as part of your Sprint tasks (or authored as additional Sprint tasks).

If you are a developer, and you can have the discipline to keep the Sprint board updated, then this approach can work for your team.

If you are a lead, and you can have the discipline to manage the backlog and ensure the Sprint stories are properly written, prioritized, and aligned, then this approach can work for your team.

But you can see how if even one of these pieces doesn’t work (and it might even just be because of workload and busyness, not desire), then suddenly the reporting doesn’t work and now you have longer standups, in-person meetings, and lengthy 1-1 phone calls, just to get all the information flowing back and forth properly.