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Discussion on: Can Developer Productivity be Measured?

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docsbydesign profile image
Bob Watson • Edited

I agree with the approach, but I would modify the terminology. Measurement evokes a sense of objectivity, which the introduction describes as difficult to impossible to apply. I'd call your rubric more of an evaluation. It's subjective but also transparent. If done well, it describes what you value as a manger and an organization and can be used to have constructive discussions with subordinates. At the same time it requires a degree of involvement with them that LOC and commit-counters might prefer to avoid due to a lack of time, interest, and/or people skills.

LOC are objective, easy, and make for pretty progress charts but they are too easily gamed and encourage the wrong goals

My personal experience with LOC came after a large refactor that eliminated bugs and improved reliability, but cut LOC by 30%. In the minds of LOC counters, I had just reduced the value of the product and was "rewarded" accordingly. So, full disclosure, I'm not a fan and In my experience they are worse than nothing when they encourage bad code over good. I've also worked with "movers and shakers" who just churned the code, not really advanced it.

You can't really apply process-based metrics to something until you have a repeatable process with consistent units of input and output.

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optimite profile image
Optimite • Edited

There are truly objective metrics out there now, which take into account the contextual difference every developer works in, that analyse revisions from multiple dimensions such as it's Volume, Complexity and Interrelatedness altogether.

As Jilles said, it's true that gut feelings and opinions are part of the process with other metrics but now there are measures that eliminate that altogether. It's possible to directly compare productivity (one metric) and maintainability (another metric from a quality perspective) of code provided by a developer, which starts to make comparison of developer effort on every project fair and allows everyone to move forward together to improve the rate at which code is delivered and simultaneously advance it.

They're useful as they give you an indication of where to look, especially if you're going to be working on different projects with many teams wouldn't you say?

Anyway the metrics I was talking about earlier and I've come across so far is provided by BlueOptima (blueoptima.com).