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Ask HN: How do you assess developer productivity?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you assess developer productivity?

#21

Post by bendmorris »

mathematically wrote: post #3

It's best to give up the idea of measuring software productivity entirely. Almost no one would seriously wonder how to measure artistic productivity and software engineering is a lot more like art than most people realize because it is fundamentally a creative activity. Software is also too abstract to be measured the same way assembly line productivity is measured so there is no point in trying to impose a metric ba…

Any large tech company has teams dedicated to improving developer productivity. So how do you assess the quality of those teams' work, or that they're worth the investment, or help them prioritize projects? Just don't bother?

Re: Ask HN: How do you assess developer productivity?

#23

Post by mathematically »

bendmorris wrote: post #21
mathematically wrote: post #3

It's best to give up the idea of measuring software productivity entirely. Almost no one would seriously wonder how to measure artistic productivity and software engineering is a lot more like art than most people realize because it is fundamentally a creative activity. Software is also too abstract to be measured the same way assembly line productivity is measured so there is no point in trying to impose a metric ba…

Any large tech company has teams dedicated to improving developer productivity. So how do you assess the quality of those teams' work, or that they're worth the investment, or help them prioritize projects? Just don't bother?

Do you have an example of something these teams have developed that has actually made software engineers more productive?

Re: Ask HN: How do you assess developer productivity?

#24

Post by bendmorris »

mathematically wrote: post #23
bendmorris wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any large tech company has teams dedicated to improving developer productivity. So how do you assess the quality of those teams' work, or that they're worth the investment, or help them prioritize projects? Just don't bother?

Do you have an example of something these teams have developed that has actually made software engineers more productive?

No - I've worked with several teams with "productivity" right in the name, and to be honest, I'm usually skeptical when these teams claim that their work will "improve productivity" and am interested in how to evaluate their claims. If we just give up completely because the space is hard to measure, there's no check on these teams that keeps them actually working on important things, vs. making changes that they subjectively prefer.

Re: Ask HN: How do you assess developer productivity?

#25

Post by mathematically »

bendmorris wrote: post #24
mathematically wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have an example of something these teams have developed that has actually made software engineers more productive?

No - I've worked with several teams with "productivity" right in the name, and to be honest, I'm usually skeptical when these teams claim that their work will "improve productivity" and am interested in how to evaluate their claims. If we just give up completely because the space is hard to measure, there's no check on these teams that keeps them actually working on important things, vs. making changes that they subj…

Software engineering is a form of process automation which by its nature is a form of productivity improvement. So if some teams are not streamlining and consistently improving business processes then asking another team to help them do so with more software is kinda nonsensical.

For a while I worked on build tools and CI pipelines and I can honestly say that I never improved anyone's productivity. Most of my work was figuring out how to remove performance bottlenecks that unwitting software engineers would invariably add to the build and test process because a manager was breathing down their neck about delivering some feature yesterday. If business processes are dysfunctional then that's not a software productivity problem and can not be fixed by adding more software.

Re: Ask HN: How do you assess developer productivity?

#26

Post by mikewarot »

How often do goals get met, on time? If you can rely on estimates, and get good results, you've got a productive developer. The one time I managed someone as a programmer, I really, really lucked out, and he was great at it. We would discuss something that had to be done on Tuesday, I might get a question or two, otherwise nothing until he showed it to me done on Friday, and it was always up to snuff.

Re: Ask HN: How do you assess developer productivity?

#27

Post by errantmind »

There is no quantitative way to do it as any measure will be gamed or will not be representative of all the dimensions of what makes a successful project.

High performing teams that I've been on rely on developers to meet their own given estimates and effectively communicate. It is pretty obvious when someone is repeatedly dodging as they will be unable to convincingly explain their status to their own team members.

Basically, each team member holds each other accountable. This only works if they have strong, shared incentives.

Re: Ask HN: How do you assess developer productivity?

#28

Post by gregjor »

tofukid wrote: post #13
gregjor wrote: post #7

Can you define developer productivity? Before you can measure something you need to have a definition. Measuring PRs and commits is like measuring a writer’s productivity by how many sheets of paper they use. A useful metric might be derived from business value added vs. cost of programming effort, but then how well can the organization measure business value? Or the cost of programmer effort?

Writers do measure productivity by pages written… sure, they may not write a best seller, but there’s a date they start writing and a date the book is published and the book has a word count. I agree though that lines of code or number of pages doesn’t have much of a relationship to revenue.

Pages and word count are after-the-fact measures and don’t have a relationship to either perceived value or productivity. Nor does the time it takes to write a book. Schedule and length may be imposed by an editor or publisher, just like programmers get from managers.

Code that adds business value (or reduces business costs), delivered within schedule and budget, is what management looks for. But is that What we mean when we programmers talk about productivity? I don’t think so.

Re: Ask HN: How do you assess developer productivity?

#29

Post by gregjor »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #15
tofukid wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Writers do measure productivity by pages written… sure, they may not write a best seller, but there’s a date they start writing and a date the book is published and the book has a word count. I agree though that lines of code or number of pages doesn’t have much of a relationship to revenue.

Writing is a bad analogy for programming.

In some respects, yes. But both are creative and technical processes that show huge variance in quality and value across writers and programmers. No analogy is perfect but if we intend to measure programmer productivity we can start by looking at how that’s measured in similar activities.

Re: Ask HN: How do you assess developer productivity?

#30

Post by nickd2001 »

Doesn't seem to me that you can really measure productivity at all. How do you compare : (a) dev that writes tons of code and makes things over complex and not maintainable (b) dev that writes hardly any code, procrastinates, but their code is v high quality, simple, has no problems (c) dev that cranks out a lot of code but is horrible to work with and very good teammates quit (d) dev whose code output isn't high but that's cos they do tons of useful mentoring leading to other people's output being good
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