I have been in my current job for a year now, which means that it is time for the Annual Review. The Annual Review is one of those management carry-overs from days past that I wish would just go away. I’m still trying to wrangle out of mine.

In theory, the Big Annual Review serves a couple purposes

• Feedback
• Goals
• Promotions

Lets look at these in reverse order.

Promotions – Whether or not someone is getting a promotion and the associated monetary amount is largely already determined before the actual review takes place. It is also the thing people most care about it. Money might not be the only thing motivating someone, but it likely plays more than a bit part in it. Promotions are (typically) awarded based upon merit, so it would make sense to award them upon occurrence rather than wait an artificial time period until their review to grant it. In sports, if someone has earned a place on a higher line, you do not wait until the end of season player review, you do it as soon as possible; likely during the break between periods/quarters.

Goals – So far, I have participated in 6 or 7 Goal planning sessions. As a tester I inevitably end up with some variant of “Assist team in developing high Quality software on budget.” This goal certainly does not pass the SMART test. When I have challenged this goal, I often end up with goals written to a very high degree of precision. “Automate all existing test cases in feature X” for instance. The problem with this is that while it is clear and progress can be measured against it, goals are heuristic. When deciding when to allocate tasks I might have to do I could choose to automate feature X or I could automate feature Y which might have a better reason for automation other than it is written down somewhere that I should do it. Individually, athletes might set a goal for themselves of “Score a Goal” or “Do less harm than good” but as a coach, goals are often specified for you — especially in house leagues. The lacrosse association I coach with has a progression chart for all players regarding which skills they should know when. How we achieve those results is entirely up to us though. As a team we also set goals for the season. I think the key difference between the two is that goals set in the review context are often checkboxes which then get fed into the following year’s review. In sports they serve as motivators and form part of the journey. Guess which one results in the most pride by the person.

Feedback – How many people have received feedback, either positively or negatively, during a review on something that happened 3 months previous? 6 months? 9 months? I would wager a guess that most people have. I know I have. One of the critical things TDD (and CI) have re-introduced to the world is the notion of rapid feedback. If it takes longer than 10 minutes to figure out if the last check-in broke the build then it is too long. If it takes 10 months to tell me that you though my usual quality dropped in April, that too is too long. Feedback to people needs to be just as fast as for builds. See something great, praise it. See something less than stellar, grab the tiller and correct it for it gets completely out of control. Much like the example in Promotions, feedback is given instantly in sports in a couple ways.

• Break a rule, go to the penalty box / sin bin / whatever
• Break it too many times and the person is removed from the game
• Break one of the coaches rules and you might miss a shift or two

All these are feedback methods and are doled out immediately. Most management books (like Behind Closed Doors recommend having weekly meetings with your directly reporting staff. If done properly, the need for big annual reviews likely becomes unnecessary as the feedback cycle has itself become Agile. Again, guess which one is more effective at entrenching desired behavior or removing unwanted; when it occurs, or at some point later down the road.

(This is part of a series of posts on how Coaching and Testing mesh)