Measuring Effectiveness of a Knowledge Worker
The beginning of a new year is often the time of setting goals. Way too often I need to explain why it’s a bad idea to judge developers’ performance by code coverage, story pints accomplished or lines of code that she wrote. Here is one more argument against it:
The manual worker can always be judged in terms of the quantity and quality of a definable and discrete output, such as a pair of shoes. We have learned how to measure efficiency and how to define quality in manual work during the last hundred years - to the point where we have been able to multiply the output of the individual worker tremendously. […] The imposing system of measurements and tests which we have developed for manual work - from industrial engineering to quality control - is not applicable to knowledge work. […] Working on the right things is what makes knowledge work effective. This is not capable of being measured by any of the yardsticks for manual work.” Peter F. Drucker, The Effective Executive, p. 2-3, Harper Collins Publishers, 2002