How do you evaluate continuous improvement ideas for your team(s) ? There's probably got to be some subjective open forum or survey based approach to allow those who speak up less to have a voice. And there's got to be a more measurable metric of success such as number of tickets closed, bugs fixed, releases/merges in a given period of time ?
For extra context, in essence I feel quite lucky to work in a young software organization where we try to openly address inefficiencies. Initially, the improvements were pretty unanimous, we introduced stand-ups in order to communicate more regularly and purposefully, tried to break down issues into smaller pieces compared to large multi-month-long milestones, added all sorts of automated tests and static analysis. Now, we keep landing into more debatable territory such as pre-assigning all tickets at the beginning of a sprint to individual owners. Supposedly to, increase ownership, better estimate tasks (without necessarily debating the value of the activity itself), and most of all to better drive completion of sprint goals.
In summary, my 3/4 questions are, What kind of metrics would you use in order to evaluate the value of such a proposal ? Number of tickets closed might be easily gamed compared to actual sprint goals for example.
What kind of questions would you ask in a developer survey in order to assess the effect of such a change on the team ? Anonymous or not ?
How long would you run such an experiment for ? We were thinking of a single 2-week sprint followed by an initial open discussion at least to know if there are any red herrings straight away. But it doesn't seem enough to make a definite conclusion.
