I love metrics

I love metrics. I love crunching out numbers, making calculations, combining them to validate outcomes, and using them to make assumptions. I love doing this when the raw data is difficult to process and requires a lot of manual analysis. I even enjoy making experienced-based, best guesses and then reuse the method to improve it over time.

I think my love of metrics has grown over time. It probably commenced with my university education whereby I was taught principles, given tools, learnt methods, and applied logic to solve complex problems and to prove theories. However I didn't really know what it was all about back then, in that I didn't quite appreciate the need because I had no use for this stuff. 

This was the case until I found myself at my first employer - a small company which was struggling to survive and under-resourced to organise themselves in quality assurance, project management, and so on. I had a lot of fun learning new technologies, writing test procedures, and learning more about myself. I also enjoyed the security of working for a good Manager who provided lots of guidance. That was until he resigned and I found myself out of my comfort zone on many occasions.

Looking back I'm glad I had this experience because I quickly learnt the need to be self-organised, to know how to measure my own performance, to not assume that there are structures and systems in place to support staff, and to get involved in shaping how things are done. The need for metrics had arrived.

Throughout my career I have cycled from small companies to big ones. When I'm at a small company I get to use all of my skills, am at the forefront of the decision making process, and share in both the positives and the negatives of the trials and tribulations. It also means I can explore the boundaries of learning from our challenges to implement procedures which fix problems, apply context, and adhere to best practices.

Then when it all gets a bit too much (or shall we say when the love wears out), I find myself needing a big company fix. They have their policies, strategic objectives, standards, methodologies, procedures, templates, guidelines, and so on. Moving from a small company to a big company is easy in this regards because despite one arriving with real front-line experience, they no longer have to worry about how stuff is done. They just have to do it the way they're told. Hence provided they can handle this massive culture change, all is good....and if they can't, they'll seek other incentives such as training or promotion....or they'll probably leave and cycle back to a small company :)

From a metrics perspective this cycling between small and large companies makes sense. From my past experiences small companies enabled me to experiment with procedures, define metrics, work out how to measure them, evaluate what they mean, and then use them to benchmark future performance. At a large company I get to demonstrate this knowledge when appropriate, or when needing to try and influence change.

In a large company culture where you're meant to follow a procedure without question it isn't always easy to influence change. However I truly believe a reverse-engineering approach can work. This entails shadowing formal progress with your own metrics and using them to prove or dis-prove an outcome. If this is done with a positive frame of mind, with the best of intentions, and within a team where Management are open to new ideas, metrics based process improvements can occur. Surely Colonel Sanders measured and documented how long it took to fry same-sized, same-prepared chicken, whilst the local chicken shop which went out of business sometimes ran out of chicken, over cooked it, and served inconsistent quantities of fries!

I conclude where I began. For the number of QA/testers out there who loathe metrics (and other IT professionals), there are more of us who love metrics!