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Jonathan Hall
Jonathan Hall

Posted on • Originally published at jhall.io on

There is no "I" in "Agile"

How do you measure the individual contributions of each member of an agile software delivery team?

It’s a trick question.

You can’t.

Agile software delivery is a team sport. The team succeeds or fails together.


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Top comments (6)

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przemyslawjanbeigert profile image
Przemyslaw Jan Beigert

You can measure both: success of team and contribution of each person in the team.

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jhall profile image
Jonathan Hall

In highly collaborative work, which software engineering is, when done right, the ability to measure individual contributions means the team is dysfunctional.

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przemyslawjanbeigert profile image
Przemyslaw Jan Beigert

I disagree, even in highly collaborative project implementation of each feature is done by one or couple developers. If version control system is linking to task manager system (e.g. by ticket ids in branch names) you can easily track level of commitment (e.g. by author of commit and story points of the task).

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jhall profile image
Jonathan Hall

What you have described is definitely NOT highly collaborative.

You've described scatter/gather, which is very individualistic.

It's common, of course, but not highly collaborative.

Highly collaborative, by definition, means that many people are collaboratimg constantly. This may mean ensemble programming, for example.

In highly collaborative work, it's literally impossible to determine who did what.

You'll hear people say things like "I'm not sure whose idea that was" or "We built that together".

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przemyslawjanbeigert profile image
Przemyslaw Jan Beigert

Ok, so based on your definition software engineering is not highly collaborative.

I heard may excuses like that, "I'm not sure whose idea that was" is my second favourite just after "there's no time for write tests".

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jhall profile image
Jonathan Hall • Edited

No. Your version of software delivery isn't highly collaborative.

The version you describe IS common. But it's not the only way. And it's definitely not the best way in most cases.