Dead Fish, Salton Sea - 1983 Richard Misrach
In Big Agile, engineering = new features.
Whether you’re looking to track story points or adherence to roadmap or deployment velocity, there’s a “developer productivity dashboard” for you. In fact, there are about $200b worth to choose from, all promising to make you better, faster, and cheaper.
There’s just one problem: they don’t work.
Engineering productivity can’t be measured by tracking new features.
Engineering is not a new mobile app. Engineering is not deployments per day. Engineering is not a t-shirt size.
Engineering is building, maintaining, and evolving an interconnected system. This work of managing dependencies, resourcing, and architecture keeps you alive.
But in Big Agile, this existential work is invisible and taken for granted. Instead, you’re tracking byproducts.
The top response from engineers on how to get critical maintenance prioritized. Source: Reddit
Trying to manage engineering by looking at byproducts is like managing a company by only looking at margins.
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