Manage morale, not metrics, for more effective engineering teams

The business leaders who hire engineering firms such as mine like to see the numbers, the metrics that claim to quantify the value we create. While they may not understand the esoteric subtleties of refactoring to improve readability and conciseness, they can appreciate when code coverage increases from 85% to 90%. The numbers are going up! So something valuable must be happening, right?

The problem is that so many of these numbers are nonsense, and even the valid measures don’t work well as management tools. Metrics have their place, but they should follow where teams lead, in order to quantify the quality and worth of the solutions they’re creating. When metrics lead—when story points dictate where developers must follow—they actually get in the way of teams’ ability to innovate, create, and solve meaningful problems.