Tracking story points, commits and Jira activity as an indicator..
Yeah it sounds pretty bad. At least that is certainly the stance I would have taken back when I was a developer.
Recently I made a script that aggregates my engineers’ git activity (Commits, MRs, MR comments), Jira activity (story pints delivered, comments, tickets updated, created) and confluence (documentation activity). I don’t give this metric much weight, nor bring it up at all with most engineers, but I do use it to spot outliers.
It feels yucky and almost like a breach of trust.
Story points, at best, are a rough estimate of work delivered but more often than not are loose guesses without nuance. Git activity comes and goes (when planning projects or doing some research for example).
Nonetheless, trust but verify, right?
I have roughly 20 engineers reporting to me, with no leads in between them and myself as the manager. Our POs in the teams are pretty young and not too experienced - so I can’t lean on them too much either.
I found clear outliers in the metrics and am now doubting if these individuals are pulling their weight. We are talking about individuals with one commit in an entire month (and they gave a 1 hour workshop during that time but still..)
Am I uncovering people who have just silently quit? How does the community feel about looking at these simple activity metrics as a baseline indication?
To me it still feels like bad micro management - but what if it does show “top” engineers measurably.. not doing anything at all..