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SMART goals reduce creativity and innovation

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from lmsgoncalves.com/2013/01/14/defining-objectives-is-really-productive/

During my Christmas holidays I read a great book – “Drive”.
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Part of the book talks about goal setting
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How many of you heard that goals must be SMART? Do you actually think it is a good definition for goals? SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-scaled.
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According to the studies discussed in the “Drive”, goals tend to narrow our focus. This does not sound too bad, right?
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in reality this is good only for activities that use the left part of the brain, i.e. for simple tasks that do not require creativity. But, as Daniel warns in his book, for complex and conceptual tasks giving a specific and measurable objective can blinker the wide-ranging thinking that is necessary to come up with an innovative solution.
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Another problem with specific and measurable goals, in my opinion, is that reaching them becomes the only thing that matters.
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On a larger scale, this may cause systematic problems for the organization
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“Give a manager a target and he will do everything to achieve it. Even if he has to destroy the company in the process” by W. Edwards Deming

 

rushing without automated tests is a business mistake

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excerpts from article by Joseph Puopolo, An impassioned plea to other Start-up founders to use automated tests.

Working on the business side of the shop, I have fought against automated tests for a while. That all changed recently
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The conclusion I reached was that automated tests save developers time and let you deliver more. This was a painful admission, but a correct one.
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I have been in multiple start-ups where automated tests didn’t exist, and let me just say the QA overhead was astronomical.
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While it seems counter-intuitive, building tests saves you time in the long run. The knee jerk reaction is to spend your time building new features. I have had this reaction many times
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One of the biggest time sinks in development is finding the problem. With proper tests in place you can isolate and figure out where the issue is.
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With automated tests in place, it is easier for new developers coming into the system to understand code that they didn’t write.
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automated tests save time and help you get to market faster. If your goal is to rush to MVP without putting in place a scalable infrastructure that allows you to grow your code base, you are not only making a technical mistake but a business mistake.