Do You Measure Your Engineering Grit?

Lead Marketing Strategist

An INFJ personality wielding brevity in speech and writing.

One form of perseverance is the daily discipline of trying to do things better than we did yesterday.

The above quote is from Angela Duckworth’s book “Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance”. The book gives its readers a life-changing experience, helping them understand the path to meet goals with examples throughout. The author has designed a “Grit Scale” (available for download from the internet) which requires the readers to answer 12 questions to know how gritty they are.

In essence, the book says, irrespective of any profession, Grit is important for long term achievement and talks about “deliberate practice” as a key element of grit. What is deliberate practice? The difference between regular and deliberate practice is, “deliberate practice requires focused attention and is conducted with the specific goal of improving performance.”

What does “deliberate practice” mean to an engineering organization? Just like an athlete doing deliberate practice every single day and improving to meet his/her goal of making to the Olympics, can different personas of an engineering organization measure performance?

For example, how can hundreds of engineers who contribute to software development every single day know how their work is making a difference to the business? How can they measure performance improvement for the number of code check-ins they do every day? Are the standard metrics for measuring developer efficiency providing them with that information?

What does deliberate practice mean to technical leads and managers that are guiding and monitoring these engineers? CXO’s often talk about how their products make a difference in the market but do a CTO or a VP(Engineering) today have a way to connect their engineering organization’s work to the business? Is there a way to measure engineering grit and present it to CXO in a meeting to help him understand how “engineering grit” has improved the user experience for the customers?

In summary, can the business vision of the CEO be tied to every level below within the organization starting with the CIO, CTO, VP of Engineering, Directors, Managers, Leads, Engineers and so on? Is there a way for each persona to know how their work impacts business with data?

Yes, Zuci’s digital enablement solution HORUS makes it possible.

Head over to explore Horus

Leave A Comment Cancel reply

Method Fattiness | Why It Is Important?

What constitutes a method in programming is the number of classes. Methods, classes are all made up of lines of code. What happens when your method is fat?

Do You Measure Your Engineering Grit?

How can hundreds of engineers who contribute to software development every single day know how their work is making a difference to the business? How can they measure performance improvement for the number of code check-ins they do every day?

Churn Rate | Why It Should Be Measured

The churn rate needs to be tracked early in the process in order to save a lot of time and cost which otherwise would incur when it goes to the production phase.

Commit Count | Why It Should Be Measured

Commits are an easy way to find the contributions made by each developer in building software, it could be fixing a bug, adding new features, etc.…which determine the overall health of the software.

Class Fattiness | Why It Should Be Measured

The number of lines of code is the base upon which the quality and the complexity of the software that you are building stands on.

Cyclomatic Complexity | Why It Should Be Measured

Cyclomatic complexity yields a value to your Software – Know how. Developed by Thomas J. McCabe, Sr. in 1976, Cyclomatic complexity is a software metric (measurement), used to indicate the complexity of a program.

Horus helps CTOs drive engineering innovation, attract and retain customers.

Horus provides an instant, real-time snapshot of technical development and facilitates the measurement of product development in terms of quality.

horus-enterprise-va-e1561615709175-compressed-image

How Horus Can Transform Your Enterprise

What’s the difference between great engineering organizations that change the world, and other engineering organizations that fail?

Developers Can Prove Their True Worth With Horus Digital Enablement Tool

It was the worst day of her life. Sara Shahi had expected glowing words of praise, a hefty raise, and a promotion to Senior Developer, perhaps even Team Lead. Instead, her annual appraisal turned out to be nothing short of a firing squad. Pun intended.

How Horus Enables Architects To Deliver Business Results

Madin “Root” Rutgers had everything it took to be a successful software architect. He was technically-inclined, a great problem-solver, and possessed excellent interpersonal relationship skills. A wonderful leader, he was extremely reliable and could be counted on to deliver, especially under pressure and tight deadlines.

CIOs Can Cut Development Costs In Half With Horus Digital Enablement Tool

Things were getting out of hand for Jack Reese, CIO. The more code commits his engineers made, the more liabilities they introduced in the form of practically untraceable bugs. The technical debt of his code base just kept piling up. Every moment spent was an expense that showed up on the balance sheet… that he had to answer for. Fortunately, he found a solution in Horus.