Comment by rybosworld 12 hours ago
Just to play devils advocate:
If you have two engineers and one consistently completes 10 points a sprint and the other only completes 2 points a sprint, does that not tell you something about the output of those engineers?
Not without much more data. Is the 2 pt engineer the one senior who supports all the juniors and multiplies their effectiveness by getting them unstuck, or is the 2 pt engineer the one who always takes the hard (misestimated) stories, or maybe they are the CEO's nephew and they just suck. No way to know just from pts completed.
Mr 2 Points might be taking one for the team, doing a task that would cost Mrs 10 Points 3-5 points of productivity if they were saddled with it.
Low point stories that take a lot of time are often coordination tasks, and for people who are good at heads down programming, that can be their kryptonite.
It's also possible that Mr 2 Points is not getting fed stories that they could weave into the blocking points of their highest priority task effectively. He is spending a lot of time working on untracked tasks or sneakily working on stories halfway down the backlog. And they can't do it in the open because someone is engaging in Efficiency Theater: we are so far behind on some milestone that the optics of anyone working on anything except that milestone are terrible.
Nevermind that the next milestone needs them and we will be having this Death March repeat again in three months because of it.
At best it may indicate that there's something worth looking into, but it doesn't tell you much about the actual productivity of the engineers. One engineer may be producing low quality output that requires a lot of re-work later, or they might be gaming the system by over-estimating work, or picking up lower priority work that was accidentally over-estimated in order to improve their numbers. They may be a domain expert in a particular system while the other developer is getting up to speed. One developer may be spending significantly more time mentoring or helping their team work better. They might be writing design documents or spending more time with customers. They might have been around longer and are regularly getting pulled into supporting things they worked on years ago, or getting asked for help from other teams who need their expertise.