Counting What Really Counts
Counting What Really Counts
Adapted from an article by Harry Robinson, Six Sigma test productivity program manager at Microsoft and sent to me by Daisy Huss on the ACE Team
The original article was published in Interface in December 2001.
Scene one. You are picnicking by a river. You notice someone in distress in the water. You jump in and pull the person out. The mayor is nearby and pins a medal on you. You return to your picnic.
A few minutes later you spy a second person in the water. You perform a second rescue and receive a second medal.
A few minutes later, a third person, a third rescue, and a third medal. And so on through the day.
By sunset, you are weighed down with medals and honors. You are a hero. Of course, somewhere in the back of your mind there is a sneaking suspicion that you should have walked upriver to find out why people were falling in all day. Then again, that wouldn’t have earned you as many awards.
Scene two. You are sitting at your computer. You find a bug. Your manager is nearby and pins a “bug-finder” award on you. A few minutes later you find a second bug. And so on.
By the end of the day, you are weighed down with “bug-finder” awards and all your colleagues are congratulating you. You are a hero. If the thought pops up in your mind that maybe you should help prevent those bugs from getting into the system, you squash it. Bug prevention doesn’t win nearly as many awards as bug hunting.
What you measure is what you get
B.F. Skinner told us fifty years ago that rats and people tend to perform those actions for which they are rewarded. It is still true today. In our world, as soon as developers find out that a metric is being used to evaluate them, they strive mightily to improve their performance relative to that metric—even if their actions don’t actually help the project. If your testers find out that you value finding bugs, you will end up with a team of bug-finders. If prevention is not valued, prevention will not be practiced.
June 15, 2008 at 10:27 pm
I heard this same scene before, but the person telling it used “babies floating down a river.” For some reason, I don’t think I’ll ever have a problem not being able to remember that.