How to game dev metrics with Ray Elenteny of Solutech

**Dan Lines** (0:00)
Hey, everyone, welcome to Dev Interrupted. I'm your host, Dan Lines, and today's topic is how to gain Dev metrics. We're going to discuss the three easiest ways to gain Dev metrics at your company and explain the leading causes behind each one. I'm joined today by software architecture expert and agile enthusiast Ray Elenteny. Ray, thanks for joining us.
Awesome, yeah, great to have you on the pod today. Before we dive into our main topic around gaming metrics, I always like to give a little bit of context about your background, what you're working on, where did you come from, and maybe what size teams you typically work with.

**Ray Elenteny** (0:45)
Right, yeah, thanks, and appreciate the opportunity. Yeah, first of all, I love the tech business.
I started coding in 1976, and I've been doing it ever since, and I still love it. I'm just so much fortunate enough to get paid for my hobby is the way I think of it.
And so I've been around the block a few times, obviously, but I've been managing teams in one way or another since the early 90s, managing teams from as few as four or five architects to up to 150, a team of 150 developers. Right now I'm out on my own and helping teams and companies improve their processes and their architecture. And I've worked all kinds of stacks. So right now I'm in the Java React Stack Kubernetes world and having a lot of fun there.

**Dan Lines** (1:37)
That's awesome. It sounds like you have a really diverse background, have been in the industry for a while.
Can you remember your first programming language that you started using in the 70s? I always like to ask that.

**Ray Elenteny** (1:52)
I do. It was in Basic. I was on paper tape with Prime Mini computers where you had to teletype. And if you haven't seen paper tape before, look it up.
And that's how we stored our stuff. And everything came out on a roll of paper as we typed it and as we ran our output. I remember it well.

**Dan Lines** (2:13)
That's awesome. Thanks for sharing. So as we move focus now to our main topic of gaming dev metrics, I wanna start us off and probably, the first and easiest way to gain dev metrics at your company is to track a performance metric that's just easy to manipulate. So, like if you were tracking a metric like lines of code produced, well, I can just probably add a bunch of, probably crappy code onto my real code and I'll have a lot of lines of code produced.
Can you describe some of those metrics that come to mind and how they're easy to manipulate?

**Ray Elenteny** (2:56)
Well, lines of code is definitely one for sure. It's really easy for developers to, you know, figure out how they wanna manage it. It's getting a little bit tougher with some of the tools that exist today, but it's still one of the big ones. Of course, there's Velocity in the Agile project and we'll talk about that a little bit more, but, you know, padding stories, whatever, you know, adding stories that are just kind of senseless with a couple of points that really don't do anything. One of them that is, and I thought about this recently is organizations that track bugs within a sprint, right? And say, you know, from a developer's perspective, and quite frankly, engineering perspective, you know, something that happens within a sprint and is found by QA, that's a good thing, right? And it shouldn't be a negative that QA found 10 bugs in your code while the code is being developed. That's actually good. The bad one is, you know, bugs, escape bugs, if you will. So, but I've been on teams in organizations where bugs within a sprint, and the number of those was a negative.
You know, you don't want rampant bugs, of course, but you should expect to be finding them. That's what the team's there for.
Yeah.

**Dan Lines** (4:13)
You know, what I really wanted to ask you is, are these bad metrics to track, or is it just bad if I tie performance to them?
Because tracking bugs, for example, I don't see any problem with that. That's good to know.

**Ray Elenteny** (4:30)
Yeah, absolutely. And as a developer, quite frankly, I was just working with a QA analyst today, and he found something and some stuff that I was doing, and nice job, make, you know, create a bug for the, we don't forget this, right? And we get this work done. So absolutely, it's critical. And none of those numbers are bad, right? You need all, those numbers do, like most metrics, they provide value.