Couple of weeks back, I noticed an incident that triggered this post. Senior Management in a company applauded people for showing individual heroics on the project.
Some of them were:
- Staying late in office to address a client request?
- Responding to project emails at late night..
- Rewarding testers on number of bugs found and more.
And then, managers shared this privately with rest of the organisation too. Treating this as accepted, rewarding behaviour invited more such incidents and frustrated many of those who don’t do this. Below comic strip summarises it well.
“You Will Get What You Measure(or Reward)!”
I recently heard an another incident of how testing team kept an very important bug under the carpet before bringing it up just a week before release, and then getting rewards for the same. Such behaviours more likely are the candidates for root cause analysis than rewards.
[Read more…] about Metrics to Build Great Agile Teams: Measure Influence, Not Control