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Discussion on: anyone figured out a way to measure developer productivity?

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Dian Fay

Some things are just qualitative. Metrics can tell you how much is being done in quantitative terms but it's never the full picture. Lines of code per hour is worthless; commits per day isn't much better; sprint velocity is heavily dependent on externalities (appropriate ticket scope, consistency, developer availability, difficulty of working with the codebase) so it really only works as a relative measure.

The only way to really assess productivity is to see if you can cash the checks you write: does this thing do what we want it to do, does it do it with reasonable efficiency and few bugs, did we get it done within the time we said we were going to get it done? If so, yay, we're adequately productive.