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They are best used for witch-hunt purposes...
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But, surely, management wouldn't want to ... oh! Wait!
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I know development process bashing is very popular... but KPIs (or more generally measurements) are an essential tool for process improvement in a large organisation. In my experience, the main problem in the implementation is that the people they are made up for do not have the competence to understand them, and to derive something useful for the organisation (let alone to define what they exactly need to manage).
~RaGE();
I think words like 'destiny' are a way of trying to find order where none exists. - Christian Graus
Entropy isn't what is used to.
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KPI at least implies goals of some description, as the development goals are changed at least once a quarter, by management and is seems arbitrarily I don't see how these can apply here.
Having said that all the perms have stringent HR requirements to set, achieve and report on KPIs, I do wonder what the poor bastards do with them. As a contractor HR seem to be happy to ignore me as they can simply not renew the contract if they are not happy, I've been here 10 years  .
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity
RAH
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Well, it depends on what kind of KPIs we are talking about...
Good KPIs should:
1. say something useful
2. should mean something
3. be automated
4. show status of process not performance of single person.
So, KPIs like: lines of code/day, closed user stories, issued resolved, bugs reopened, etc. are not good KPIs. Why? They say nothing meaningful.
But they are quite easy to maintain. 
Recently after a year of research I came up with these KPIs for SCRUM process:
1. WIN/LOSE - are we under or over burndown target today?
2. DISCIPLINE - are "completed" hours reported daily in amount matching capacity?
3. ESTIMATION - hours estimated/hours total
4. PLANNING - do we have enough tasks (hours) planned to fill the capacity?
All data is pulled from TFS - there is no extra time required to complete the "dashboard".
These KPIs will be shown as total - sum for whole team.
As SCRUM master I monitor also these KPIs for individual developers - to see for example who exactly is failing with disciplined reporting.
Other KPIs are just for me - for example PLANNING: if this is red, this usually means the Product Owner failed to deliver stories, not that one of team members failed to do something.
And finally - HR does not look at the KPIs. I look at them and decide case by case what to do to correct the situation.
HR look at the yearly performance review made by superiors, where the main factor is not KPIs but the completion of personal goals....
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That's the thing, isn't it? You're 'managing' the team by making yourself aware of the project situation - that doesn't require each team member to even be aware of the KPIs - because as a good man-manager, you will make them aware of their expectations and regularly keep them notified if they are meeting them or not - doesn't need a 6 page form to do that!
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We have them presented at our monthly meeting but mostly it's support related such as which customers are in the top 10 of asking for help they're not entitled to. The results are not overly memorable but do give an interesting fly-by who the villains of the last month have been. We don't have many in the line of development so we're generally left to get on with things.
I'd not be happy having to do them just to satiate the pointless demands of HR.
If there is one thing more dangerous than getting between a bear and her cubs it's getting between my wife and her chocolate.
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There is a desire to measure everything in the world, to put a figure on quality and show it in a nice graph.
I blame computers for making it so easy to do such things.
All this performance measuring crap is unnecessary and counter-productive if you have good managers you can trust.
In most places managers have no real skill for the job, or desire for it beyond more money.
Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them.
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chriselst wrote: f you have good managers
exactly my POV. When I managed a team of devs, I knew what they were working on, how long I estimated it would take, and whether they were slacking off or working hard. I also knew how many kids they had, what their birthdays were, what their partner did etc.
I took an interest, and I cared. When it got to annual review time, they knew whether they had been doing well or not (they were always doing pretty well, frankly) and we didn't need graphs and charts because we f***ing well spoke to each other!
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Performance metrics can be useful if you can easily define and measure a meaningful definition of 'performance'. That's generally not true in software development (and some metrics, like lines of code or number of issues solved, actively lead to bad code or bad development practice).
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Couldn't agree more. 
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
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Just yesterday, I went through my annual self-assessment thingie and marked myself as expert at everything...so they'll leave me the ferk alone for another year, rather than plop out a list of "classes" I would need to take to improve myself.
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When I read the clue, "one unlikely to bring home the bacon", I'm thinking of a team/someone who always lose.
Unfortunately, the answer is vegan..
Hmmmn.. I didn't expect that one. 
Don't mind those people who say you're not HOT. At least you know you're COOL.
I'm not afraid of falling, I'm afraid of the sudden stop at the end of the fall! - Richard Andrew x64
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Bacon is the only cure for vegetarianism.
---------------------------------
Obscurum per obscurius.
Ad astra per alas porci.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur .
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Dalek Dave wrote: Bacon is the only cure for vegetarianism everything.
FTFY
Hmm i wonder why its doing that......ARGHS NO STOP, ROLLBACK ROLLBACK...F*** That's how i learned to "Always Backup"!!
Dogs are man's best Friend,
Cats are man's adorable little serial killer
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Okay, I am officially obsolete in terms of understanding what's being offered these days in home entertainment systems. I got my start with Marantz and Technics and other names no one here is old enough to remember. Reel to reel tape was the epitome of high fidelity reproduction, and video was laid down on 1" magnetic tape. Later I upgraded to 4 track, then 8 track tape, then on to cassettes and the magic of Dolby. Since then I've fallen a bit behind the curve...
My last purchase was a perfectly excellent receiver made by Technics (Panasonic) to match my turntable and cassette player. Both of the latter have since died, but the receiver is still going strong, so when my favorite lady suffered a terminal stereo receiver event at her house, I quite chivalrously offered my receiver as a replacement. The shameless hussy took me up on the offer, so I now have a TV and a DVD player left, and the TV isn't much good. It's time to build a new system from the ground up, starting with a decent receiver. I found a reasonably priced one at Walmart, an Onkyo HT-RC560 7.2 channel Network A/V Receiver that I think is a good platform on which to build my next, and possibly last entertainment system, but I have no idea what most of its features do for me.
Can someone point me to a tutorial about current tech so that I can at least read and understand the specs?
Will Rogers never met me.
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I am at least old enough to remember Marantz, you brought back fond memories of my first system. I gave up on trying to understand the ipod generation's systems and play my music on window's media player, amplified through a system I bought at Wal-Mart. 
<sig notetoself="think of a better signature">
<first>Jim</first> <last>Meadors</last>
</sig>
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So, you are currently This guy[^] - it was ever thus for me...
Those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it. --- George Santayana (December 16, 1863 – September 26, 1952)
Those who fail to clear history are doomed to explain it. --- OriginalGriff (February 24, 1959 – ∞)
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Roger, you and me share the same problems. I don't have a HIFI anymore except that in my car where I stick a CD in and press a button to eject it. There's no ambiguity; it either works or it doesn't and if it doesn't then turning that rotary knob left or right to adjust the volume usually does the trick.
I have a similar setup on my iMac at home. I stick a CD in and the blasted thing greedily accepts it. There's no button to eject it, nothing. You have to press a so-called eject key. Maybe that works in Mac OS mode but I run mine using 7. The eject key does not always work, so I have to reboot.  On the few occasions I've used the CD slot I've regretted it so I don't bother anymore.
Best of luck in your mission to bring yourself into the 21st Century. You'll need it!
If there is one thing more dangerous than getting between a bear and her cubs it's getting between my wife and her chocolate.
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I usually look at a few things.
Many ways to input devices.
Nowadays you need more then a few male jacks for plugging in noise. There are optical cables, single jacks, double jacks (meaning the goold old fashioned white/red set), headphone jacks, usb ports, HDMI, dock connecters, bluetooth, ...
not sure what exists nowadays, but I would go for the more the merrier (you never know what they'll invent tomorrow)
Output
I find a 100 Watt system already powerful enough for home entertainment (I think they use RMS now, which has a different scale somehow) A system capable of 5.1/dts is always nice.
remote control
They try to connect devices so you can use them with one remote. Useless feature, because you'll probably never buy all devices from the same manufacturer.
Mine is a JVC I bought 10 years ago, wonderful machine, still does the job as it was new.
hope this helps.
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That helps a bit, V. 
By the way, honest manufacturers have always used RMS ratings; only a few played dirty using other terms. RMS is simply an acronym for a mathematical formula - Root-Mean-Square. What it means is that, for each point on a signal waveform, you square the value first, then calculate the mean of all the values. Since an ac signal has positive and negative, calculating the mean directly won't work, since most of the samples will be cancelled out by equally valued samples of opposite sign. The last step is to take the square root of the mean to return the value to a real scale. The reason we use RMS is to compare apples to apples when dealing with random samples of music signals. No matter what the wave shape might be, RMS reduces it to a common measure. It's easy to explain mathematically, but difficult in words. If you're curious, I'm sure Wikipedia has a decent explanation, with examples.
Will Rogers never met me.
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Onkyo at Walmart? Onkyo used to make top of the line equipment but like you I wouldn't know what features to look for.
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That surprised me, too! I'm not sure what specs are important, but I do know that my old one didn't have enough inputs for the devices I had. This one has a bunch of HDMI jacks, so I suspect that's a good thing. I can remember guys arguing about channel power, THD, bandwidth, dynamic range and such, and spending thousand$ on equipment that had specs far beyond what the human ear is capable of detecting. I'm thinking those days are over, and all the signal processing is done on a single IC used by all of them, so I don't need to read the details.
Will Rogers never met me.
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Yeah I can remember back in the day the EE's I worked with describing all the specs for their equipment and it was way over my head. I'm about have deaf anyway and have had a ringing in my ears since my little excursion across the big pond so for me to spend all that money on equipment would be a waste.
Roger Wright wrote: I'm thinking those days are over, and all the signal processing is done on a single IC used by all of them, so I don't need to read the details.
I think you're probably right, the only difference is the output power and the number of devices you can plug into it.
On a different note: Am heading to the west again for a month and going to be working my way around much of AZ and UT, don't know whether I'll get up your way or not but will give you a shout if I do, maybe we can get together this time?
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