Planet SCM

Want to keep your team focused?  Use checklists - but not any old checklist - try using ETVX - Entry-Task-Verification-eXit

1.       Entry:  What criteria must be met before a process can start

2.       Tasks:  Lists of tasks to be performed for this process

3.       Verification:  The means by which the team can tell that the process was completed properly

4.       Exit:  A list of outputs from the process

Its simple.  Easy to consume.  Something quick to put onto a whiteboard in your team room.   Of course you can get fancy if you  want.  For giggles I implemented work items in Team System to help me track this, but it was a pain for reporting since none of the default VSTS reports supported this method nicely. 

If you are using VSTS, this may not replace your normal work item tracking system.  It can be used to augment how you communicate to your team by providing a higher level reminder of what everyone should be doing in a particular block of time/phase/or process on a project.

History: Rajashima introduced this method to Jeff De Luca who was a founding father of Feature Driven Development.

Check out this article by Nigel Cheshire - quoting both Sam Guckenheimer and Joel Spolsky about whether or not measuring developer performance is a good thing or not.  Both Sam and Joel say to stay clear away from doing this.  Where do you stand?  Personally, I say that we need to "professionalize" our industry a bit more before we can be effective at doing this.  Tools like Team System make instrumentation of developers a lot easier, however I don't think we can clearly understand the inter-relationship of metrics on individual developers well enough yet.  Nigel compares Sales people to Developers in this respect - asking why we can ask Sales people to hit metrics and not ask Developers to do the same.

 I think we'll be there one day - however, I think the real way to measure developers is how they interact as a team - and from that measure the team by the results of that team - in this case the software they develop.  Our industry needs to has a lot more maturing to do before we should focus on individual developer metrics, as there are likely hundreds of other aspects organizations can improve upon first that have greater value. 

http://au.sys-con.com/read/325131.htm