Taste is the soft skills side of exercising an idea. Skills are the actual technical skills. Both of those are measurable and quantifiable. Most people will arg

Taste is the soft skills side of exercising an idea. Skills are the actual technical skills. Both of those are measurable and quantifiable. Most people will argue this, often for self centered reasons because they don’t know how to measure things. Even then the people that do measure things frequently measure the wrong things in defense of themselves. Here is how to solve for that: when it comes to measurements always put the product first and the people second. For example: * Is the product fast? If so how fast and compared to what baseline? All that matters is the performance difference in numbers. * Is the product correct? Most of the time shops will measure for correctness of a developers contributions. That is putting people before the product. Instead measure the defects (both quantity and severity) coming out of the product. * Do you have test automation? The only things that matter with test automation are the quantity of business requirements covered and the speed of execution. If your test automation takes hours to fire up or if it covers almost nothing nobody is going to use it. If the test automation covers more than 80% of the business requirements and executes in less than 2 minutes everybody will use it all the time because failing that costs less than involving other people. * How long does it take to complete a new feature or solve a defect? If it takes a week you can deliver 5x less than if it takes a day. Simplicity and predictability in the code are major factors here. * Do design decisions prioritize familiar conventions over evidence? Does your team do something just because it’s the framework way or because it’s a popular way of doing things or do your compare viable options and the one that scores highest? Taste is how you convey these kinds of things. Most of those things listed above scare the shit out of developers. It takes a special kind of person to impose product measures contrary to the status quo and make the developers empowered for it.