Measuring Your Way To Improvement

When we plan our way to becoming better at anything we have to find a way to grade progress.  Thus, measuring is a critical factor in improving our performance.  We can try to achieve success with something that is not measured.  However, how do we know when we have made an improvement or when we have gotten worse? Measuring Provides Our Pace We often talk about becoming better developers.  In doing so, we assume that there are specific ways to measure our progress as a developer.  These metrics include coding skills, problem-solving productivity, job difficulty that we can handle, and more.  The way we track progress is a vital part of how we plan for improvement.  Just as a lack of measurement inhibits declaring success, the granularity of our analysis has the same impact. As an example, pretend that the smallest measurement was a foot.  Inches do not exist, and there is no way to have a partial foot.  Thus, things are 1, 2,3, or more feet tall.  If you are 5'7" and your friend is 6'1" your heights would be five and six feet tall respectively.  On the other hand, add five inches to both heights, and now you are the same six-foot height.  In a race, you might get six inches closer to the person ahead of you, but you would still be a foot behind them using that approach.  Thus, you improvement has to be at least a foot at a time to see any at all. The Abstract is a Challenge The differences in heights are apparent without worrying about measurements.  However, abstract ideas are not so easily distinguished.  A classic example of this is how we measure developer productivity.  There are fundamental differences in measuring by lines of code written, function points, or hours of time sitting at a keyboard. This leads to our challenge in becoming better.  We need to choose a way to measure progress that fits our goals.  Thus, we are back to defining our "why."  Before we embark on a journey of self-improvement, we need to establish and refine our goals.  Becoming wealthy is not likely a goal.  Early retirement or the ability to travel is a better target.  How many of us care about the amount of money we have outside of what that can buy for us? In this episode, we look at ways to measure our progress as part of servicing the "why" that points to our ultimate goals.  In doing so, we might find that our journey is not as long and arduous as we thought it would be.