Re:Ask HN: How does your company do performance reviews?
by humanrebar on Wednesday August 02, 2017 @06:04AM
(#14909315)
That's a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose and value of story points. I hope that comes up in retrospectives.
Aggregating them for an individual developer over a long enough period of time might work, but I wouldn't trust it without some statistical hypothesis testing backing the idea up.
But using them to evaluate productivity on a small scale violates the collaborative culture (people over processes) that agile is supposed to foster. I've also seen them misused by:
* mapping them explicitly to hours or days
* thinking they are estimates of value produced instead of work required
* having project managers point and pull in things for developers
I'm not sure what an individual contributor can do about that kind of cultural issue. Insisting on using story points properly seems academic or pedantic, but the second- and third-order effects are an expensive-to-maintain product, a decrease in velocity, and probably developer retention problems.
But, no, I've never heard of agile mistakes coming up in a performance evaluation or a 180 review for a manager.
Aggregating them for an individual developer over a long enough period of time might work, but I wouldn't trust it without some statistical hypothesis testing backing the idea up.
But using them to evaluate productivity on a small scale violates the collaborative culture (people over processes) that agile is supposed to foster. I've also seen them misused by:
I'm not sure what an individual contributor can do about that kind of cultural issue. Insisting on using story points properly seems academic or pedantic, but the second- and third-order effects are an expensive-to-maintain product, a decrease in velocity, and probably developer retention problems.But, no, I've never heard of agile mistakes coming up in a performance evaluation or a 180 review for a manager.