Believe it or not -- I saw this question posted dead serious at LinkedIn the other day. It made me think, we need to spend more efforts on training everyone to see the negative impact of individual performance measurements.

Have you ever been in an organization where testers were praised for no. of defects found? Though it is harder to measure, wouldn't you agree that it would be more useful to praise people for "no. of bugs that were never introduced due to close collaboration and mentoring of developers"? I need to emphasize that the latter is of far greater importance than the number of bugs discovered.

And here's the important part -- Doing individual performance ratings will seriously constrain peoples innovative abilities, and thus their abilities to do real value stream improvements. In addition, individual performance ratings will encourage people to NOT help each other, even when it is clear it will be of greater benefit for the company.

Promise me you won't do it

By Sune Gynthersen