Thats why bugs and chores have 0 points per default in pivotal tracker. Thats also why there was a push to force us say "as a user i..." at the beginning of story descriptions to make sure this is something creating user value. With these guards in place i don't follow the argument that productivity is not measurable, if a team builds features that solve an expressed user need and lets even say go through a final user acceptance check, this is a productive process and it is also very measurable!
There's No Such Thing as Software Productivity (2012)
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Re: There's No Such Thing as Software Productivity (2012)
#102[dead]
Re: There's No Such Thing as Software Productivity (2012)
#103[dead]
Re: There's No Such Thing as Software Productivity (2012)
#104Impact is the only useful metric.
It is staggeringly hard to measure.
Output is a weak proxy for impact. But it’s the one that makes intuitive sense to people. Doesn’t make it right or useful. I’m sure you all can envision a parable about your subfield of expertise that showcases how a seemingly light touch has a huge positive impact.
Re: There's No Such Thing as Software Productivity (2012)
#105Impact is the only useful metric. It is staggeringly hard to measure. Output is a weak proxy for impact. But it’s the one that makes intuitive sense to people. Doesn’t make it right or useful. I’m sure you all can envision a parable about your subfield of expertise that showcases how a seemingly light touch has a huge positive impact.
> It is staggeringly hard to measure.
It's straight up impossible. Best we can do is observe and attempt to measure proxies.
Take hypothetical situation: VPs A & B debate a business decision. Let's say A wins the argument and their solution leads to a revenue increase of $10M, and let's say we can confidently state that this is the outcome driven primarily by them winning the argument. Is the impact a net growth in business of $10M? In a sense, yes; but in some other sense, perhaps if they went with B's solution, the revenue growth would have been $15M? There's probably no way to know for sure unless you try both approaches, which is often impossible...
Re: There's No Such Thing as Software Productivity (2012)
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ok, but then what is a way to do it? The text gives an example to the core problem, and to argue differently requires thinking around it. In practice. I’ve seen many attempts at measuring productivity, but once you dig into them, you see they are just abstraction mechanisms above something that is similar to lines of code. I have yet to see an idea that sidesteps the core issue described in this post. Also, it applie…
Happy Customers. All other measures are a proxy for happy customers. Actually, happy customers is also a proxy (the real measure is profits) but measuring profits directly (in the short term) can lead to decisions that have adverse long term effects. It's too easy to increase profits in the short term by avoiding long-term expenses. So, if you're in the business of software, the goal is happy customers. (And I use th…
When a measure becomes the objective, it ceases to be a good measure.
Even if you could perfectly measure customer happiness (very hard, as you note) - it's relatively easy to make customers happy by giving them more value than what they pay for. Sure, that may cost your business more money than what it makes with said customers, but hey, who cares, "profit" was not the metric...
(and as you note, if you make "profit" the metric, that has its own set of challenges - e.g. the optimization towards short-term profit in detriment of the long-term sanity, which is what we observe in a lot of corporations).
Re: There's No Such Thing as Software Productivity (2012)
#107Impact is the only useful metric. It is staggeringly hard to measure. Output is a weak proxy for impact. But it’s the one that makes intuitive sense to people. Doesn’t make it right or useful. I’m sure you all can envision a parable about your subfield of expertise that showcases how a seemingly light touch has a huge positive impact.
> It is staggeringly hard to measure. It's straight up impossible. Best we can do is observe and attempt to measure proxies. Take hypothetical situation: VPs A & B debate a business decision. Let's say A wins the argument and their solution leads to a revenue increase of $10M, and let's say we can confidently state that this is the outcome driven primarily by them winning the argument. Is the impact a net growth in b…
My theory is that impact is heavily context dependent.
If you can solve a problem quickly, at the right time, with buyin from your org, that’s positive impact.
That general case differs wildly when you descend to the particulars.
Re: There's No Such Thing as Software Productivity (2012)
#108I'm not sure I follow. So you failed to measure software productivity in lines of code, therefore it follows that "There's No Such Thing as Software Productivity"? Don't you think that giving up after n=1 attempts at measuring software productivity might be a tad too fast to draw a generalized claim of impossibility? I might argue the real lesson learned is "Lines of Code are Not a Measure of Productivity in an Isola…
I agree. I know from looking at a story that if Alice picks it up it’ll take her about a day and be decent quality, but if Bob picks it up it’ll take him about a week and be worse quality. And I know that this will be pretty consistent week-in, week-out.
Developer productivity exists and I am totally comfortable describing Alice as being more productive than Bob. The fact that there isn’t a good, generic way to distill this into particular values does not mean that the phenomenon doesn’t exist.
We’ve all worked with Alice and Bobs. Claiming there’s no such thing as developer productivity is denying what we’ve all experienced. We aren’t special snowflakes whose work is beyond the ken of mortal men. Our work has value and sometimes we produce a lot of value in a particular time period and sometimes we product a little. This is productivity.
Re: There's No Such Thing as Software Productivity (2012)
#109Clicked for the bait, stayed for the background tile.
Re: There's No Such Thing as Software Productivity (2012)
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't the output, the singular goal, always money? (As sad as that may be.)
Money is the measure of usefulness. By the way, why suddenly the money=bad sentiment is so popular? I thought USSR example loudly showed us what happens when people think that money is evil.
"Money is the measure of usefulness?"
Good lord. There's so much wrong with this statement that I doubt I can meaningfully respond to it. I'll try, though.
If we have to reduce measures of usefulness to a single metric, then why not percentage of users who respond favorably?
I daresay that people find air quite useful, and for the most part, air is free.