Progress Reports

Question

I'm not talking about the kind you get in college, but rather implementing progress reports on the Job for developers.

My thoughts in organizing a development team is encouraging and, to some extend, requiring regular progress updates were developers would report on what they did in the last hour or few hours and how long tasks took. Below I listed a few of the pros that come to my mind

• Allowing me to go back and see were I might have made a mistake and allow myself a starting point when working to solve a problem that I created.
• Gives teams a good understanding of were they are on the project and regular updates
• For future projects, the ability to go back and see how long a certain task took and create an accurate estimate
• Encouraging a greater amount of communication among a team

What I would not want to see happen is it become a way for breathing down a developers back, and I think it could easily become a distraction if one felt pressured submit updates every hour.

• What are you thoughts?
• Pros and Cons.
• Have you ever experienced this first hand? How did it make you feel?

Answer 1

Every hour is too frequent. That many interruptions will decrease productivity, and increase developer frustration. I would suggest looking into the Scrum methodology, they have a "daily scrum" meeting, every morning where you update the team on your progress the previous day and planned work for the current day. It has worked well for me, it might work for you.

Scrum also includes the concept of story and task cards where you estimate time, and eventually come back to see how far off your estimates were. This give s you a "focus factor" that you can use to help increase the accuracy of future estimations.

Check out this PDF Scrum and XP from the Trenches for a good read about it.