Looks like I'm about 8 months late to this party, but, having recently sunk 50 hours into writing up what I hope will be a canonical guide to this very topic, figured I'd chime in. It lives here staticobject.com/measuring_develop...
Since it's a comprehensive guide (i.e., long), here's the tl; dr
"Developer productivity" can't be measured perfectly, because it includes subjective aspects like e.g., whether the developer is working on the task they were assigned. A true assessment of developer productivity requires a manager's eye.
"Developer output" can be measured, and there are three credible products that have launched in the past few years to assist in this vein. The logistics of how this is possible are more complex than will fit in a tl;dr, but basically if you strip away the 95% of commit activity that doesn't correspond to cognitive load, then you end up with a usable metric.
As you may deduce from the fact I spend 50 hours writing articles about it, this is a topic I'm deeply passionate about, so would be happy to chat with folks that have detailed questions about methodology (bill -at- staticobject.com).
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Looks like I'm about 8 months late to this party, but, having recently sunk 50 hours into writing up what I hope will be a canonical guide to this very topic, figured I'd chime in. It lives here staticobject.com/measuring_develop...
Since it's a comprehensive guide (i.e., long), here's the tl; dr
"Developer productivity" can't be measured perfectly, because it includes subjective aspects like e.g., whether the developer is working on the task they were assigned. A true assessment of developer productivity requires a manager's eye.
"Developer output" can be measured, and there are three credible products that have launched in the past few years to assist in this vein. The logistics of how this is possible are more complex than will fit in a tl;dr, but basically if you strip away the 95% of commit activity that doesn't correspond to cognitive load, then you end up with a usable metric.
As you may deduce from the fact I spend 50 hours writing articles about it, this is a topic I'm deeply passionate about, so would be happy to chat with folks that have detailed questions about methodology (bill -at- staticobject.com).