We are all crazy, but that’s another story.
Have 6-monthly or quarterly goals. Annual goals are anti-agile to the extreme. I have 3 automation goals for the quarter, and they reflect the way that having between 3 and 5 goals or objectives really boils down to good business.
- Ultimate Team goal: Deliver a release cadence of 4 releases per month. Becomes: deliver a release cadence of 2 releases per month in the short term. Requires some streamlining of processes and of CI/CD.
- Ultimate goal : Improve quality perception of the team. Becomes: Reduce post-release customer discovered bugs discovered in wild. With an action to grow test coverage intelligently to reduce bugs “that escaped”. Sub actions made for fixing and surfacing various test reports.
- Ultimate goal : Address tech debt . This is a general engineering goal. Becomes upgrading test kit and expanding the amount of kit in ways that supports the above goals.
Measurable actions here are all around some metrics we already track for how often we do release, and how often we have to abort and to hotfix. Unfortunately we have had a few releases we had to pull or patch in a hurry, and the cost of patching is something we want to avoid. Not to mention the reputation damage. This is measured month by month, and really proves we can reach the 1st 2 goals. Objective #3 is a counterbalance goal that prevents us over rotating and just releasing fast with no long term sustainability in there.
Our previous 2 quarters were actually spent working out how to make the 1st 2 goals measurable and agree on them , see recent thread here DORA any experiences - #13 by conrad.connected .