Michael Rosenbaum, founder and CEO of Catalyst IT Services, thinks it’s time to start applying the “Moneyball” tactics that have helped some baseball teams find success with undervalued players to enterprise application development teams. His company has built an analytics tool to help find developers that will work well together and build applications faster, with fewer defects. He offers the following advice:
- Pick developers who understand the business.
- Hire developers who don’t have computer science degrees because they cost less and have lower turnover rates, but produce high-quality code.
- Track developer metrics like defect rates, velocity, time per piece of functionality, keystrokes and hours per task.
- Try to build a team with good chemistry; you can tell when a team performs well together by looking at performance numbers.
