Tape_measure by pat00139 used under Creative Commons

I went to the Milwaukee ALT.NET (@AltDotNetMke) group’s Holiday hangout a couple weeks ago.  It was a fun night of drinking a couple beers, talking shop and some non-shop items.  One of the things that we talked about was something that is very near and dear to my heart: how fast can you get a new member of your team up to speed and productive and what the answer says about how mature your development processes are.  I heard a pretty surprising response from a couple of the folks at the Holiday Hang out when I asked the question.

You may have heard of the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University and their tools for measuring Information Technology / Software Development teams.  You almost certainly have heard of the Joel Test that pokes a little fun at the SEI and offers a simple 12 question “test” to rate the quality of your software development team.  I have quoted the Joel test to numerous developers and architects over the years myself.  I have a bit of a twist on both of these approaches it is a relatively simple test:

1. Bring a brand new developer onto your team.  Needs to be a developer with an average level of experience, but a “rock star” developer or a novice will not skew the results too far either way.
2. Give him/her a laptop that has access to the domain and has the basic developer tools installed (Visual Studio as an example).  But the laptop cannot have been setup by anyone on your team.
3. Give him/her basic instructions for accessing your environment (source control repository, tools you use, development servers and databases). 
4. Start timing to see how long it takes for the new developer to be able to get the latest version of your source code and successfully have it running on their machine.

The new developer is allowed to ask follow-up questions (and you should take notes on every question that they ask), but you are not allowed to actually do anything for them.  Each time that you have to look at their machine in order to answer a question, you should add an hour to the clock time.  Once the developer has the code running, take note of that time.  I like to call this the “zero to configured” metric.  If you are like most development teams, this number probably makes you want to weep uncontrollably.  Most development teams probably think this should take them a “few minutes”, but the actual number is probably located between several hours and never with most answers hovering in the neighborhood of a couple of days.  Seriously – try this test and see for yourself.

I wish I had actual data on this metric to share, but I only have anecdotal information.  But if you work in software, you probably have a lot of anecdotal stories of your own.  Here are a couple tidbits:

• The project that could not build or debug unless the files were located in C:\projects\erin
• The search for the .h file that you only have the .obj for
• The class library that only worked from C:\Program Files\ (did you know that is not a universal in Windows, it can be installed on other drives and I know that older versions of Italian installed used C:\Programi\)
• The application whose production build only worked on one developer’s laptop (and the 4 hours of terror as chkdsk and several other tools were run trying to get it passed a boot error)
• The application that required you to be running as a local administrator (*)
• Brining on an extra developer to help finish a release on time only to have him leave 2 weeks later never having written a line of code (a shining example of the Mythical Man Month)
• The unit tests that work perfectly until you deployed them on the server and then could only run if you spent an hour in regedit32

I was not personally involved in every one of these and I have tried to keep the details vague to protect the guilty (unless you name is Erin – sorry dude).

Does a high “zero to configured” metric mean you are a bad group of developers?  No.  It could be that you are a good group of developers and you don’t have a lot of new people on boarding.  We tend to work on problems that we encounter more frequently and if you don’t bring on new developer, you probably won’t address it.   It does mean that you will probably have a painful time when you get a new machine.

Does a low “zero to configured” metric mean you are an awesome group of developers?  No.  It could be you have a very simple application or spend too much time worrying about on-boarding new developers.  I will say that there is a high correlation between a good development team and a low “zero to configured” metric.

That was why I was so impressed by the answer that one of the guys gave when I asked the question at the alt.Net hangout.  He said that he rolled onto a project a few weeks before and was up and running in about 2 hours.  The impressive part was that the 2 hours included installing the local version of SQL Server.  Kudos to that team!

* Seriously – quit running as an administrator.  You will write better code, spend less time debugging issues and be much more secure as a result.

If you work in technology and have any kind of a public presence (Twitter, Personal Blog or just a profile on LinkedIn) you will eventually and probably regularly get an e-mail that goes something like this:

I came across your resume and I think you are the perfect match for <some position> at my client.  We have been searching for someone with experience in <some technology> and you seem to be a great fit.  I would like to schedule some time with you……

I chuckle every time I get one of these because in my case I can tell you that it is a bold faced lie.  My resume is not public in any way, shape or form and it is horribly out of date.  And by “horribly out of date” I mean like 10 years out of date: It lists me being a certified systems engineer on Windows NT 4 and it is in Times New Roman.  I have taken to responding to these e-mail inquiries by telling the person just that:

Hey thanks for reaching out to me.  I am sure that your client is an awesome place to work.  You might want to take a more careful look at my resume, because you will find that I am not qualified in any way shape or form to use the technology that your customer is seeking.

My response is a little snarky and I should be nicer.  I have only gotten a couple of responses from this: One asking me for my resume and one admitting that they pulled the information from LinkedIn.  Evidentially if you pay for the LinkedIn premium membership, you get a lot more tools to search for people.  Unlike some people, I am totally cool with the LinkedIn model.  They provide me a free service and as a result they collect revenue from the few people who want extra utility from the service.  As long as I can have a gateway between myself and the recruiter I am fine with that model.  The gateway being they have to contact me via LinkedIn.

I keep my information on LinkedIn reasonably current, much more so than that 10+ year old resume.  So what I have been wondering is if it is possible to do away with the resume all together?  I am not in the job market, but if I was would a recruiter or human resources department accept a hyperlink to a LinkedIn profile rather than a Word Document or PDF that contains the same information?  I would think that since LinkedIn has a consistent data structure, they would actually prefer that.

In the meantime, I hope I don’t have to update my resume any time soon….