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Can developer productivity be measured?

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Re: Can developer productivity be measured?

#131

Post by freedomben »

dahart wrote: post #113

In my ~25 years of professional software development, the single biggest factor in productivity for me has been whether I was involved at the start of a project. Knowing the initial design decisions, and being comfortable changing anything , allows me to be orders of magnitude more productive than when I'm diving into existing code designed by someone else. I saw this perhaps most acutely with a company I sold - for…

Very much agree. It honestly shocks me that more people don't recognize this. I think as humans we just tend to forget stuff over time, as we go, and as our perspective changes.

Re: Can developer productivity be measured?

#132

Post by z3t4 »

dahart wrote: post #113

In my ~25 years of professional software development, the single biggest factor in productivity for me has been whether I was involved at the start of a project. Knowing the initial design decisions, and being comfortable changing anything , allows me to be orders of magnitude more productive than when I'm diving into existing code designed by someone else. I saw this perhaps most acutely with a company I sold - for…

Make sure no code base would take more then a month to rewrite. That way it can be rewritten. But some tests could probably be reused, so tests should not be too intertwined with the code, tests should work independently from the code it tests.

Re: Can developer productivity be measured?

#133

Post by reactor »

dahart wrote: post #113

In my ~25 years of professional software development, the single biggest factor in productivity for me has been whether I was involved at the start of a project. Knowing the initial design decisions, and being comfortable changing anything , allows me to be orders of magnitude more productive than when I'm diving into existing code designed by someone else. I saw this perhaps most acutely with a company I sold - for…

Couldn't agree more. I've noticed this many times in my 16+ yrs into the industry. Not recognizing this is one of the primary reason line managers letting an employee (esp those who are involved from the beginning) go, if they are asking for a raise, thinking they are easily replaceable. It really costs the company.

Re: Can developer productivity be measured?

#134

Post by nitrogen »

kovek wrote: post #124
cratermoon wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eventually any simply metric like this will become warped because of the effects of both Goodhart's Law, and Campbell's Law.

How do people learn about a lot of “laws”? I know practically none, and it seems so useful to be able to produce them when explaining an idea...

I don't know the answer to your question, but it helps to know what Wikipedia really likes lists, so I was able to guess that it might have an article called "List of eponymous laws", and so it does:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_eponymous_laws

Re: Can developer productivity be measured?

#135

Post by nitrogen »

wsinks wrote: post #111
cratermoon wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eventually any simply metric like this will become warped because of the effects of both Goodhart's Law, and Campbell's Law.

Something that I've been wondering about is that maybe team's should decide what their metrics are for the upcoming 3 months and then come back and decide what the new metrics are. At the very least, it becomes a big game about the org then. Impossible to have 'metric based reviews' at that point. But I think that's fine.

That seems to be how quarterly planning worked in the largest org I've seen inside, though the PM and EM did most of the deciding and execs+board approved/disapproved.

Re: Can developer productivity be measured?

#136

Post by valenterry »

TameAntelope wrote: post #129
valenterry wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The value is that the developer doesn’t reasonably have the context Sorry, that English doesn't make sense to me. The value is that... the developer doesn't have context? How is not having context a value? Maybe you meant "the reason"? But then that doesn't answer the question what the value is.

The person I replied to asked what the business value was, so I explained that the [business] value comes from having a dedicated person who understands the context in which the issue is being worked.

Sorry, still don't understand.

Are you saying that without communicating progress there is no person who understands the context in which the issue is being worked in?

That doesn't make sense to me and seems to be totally orthogonal to any communication of progress.

Re: Can developer productivity be measured?

#137

Post by BXLE_1-1-BitIs1 »

I've had a number of projects to either add features or fix a bug in large volumes of truly weird (and sometimes jerkoff code), COLT and JES3 being particularly flagrant examples. It can take weeks to find out where the bad code and less than half a dozen lines to fix the problem.

In just about any system of productivity metrics, these two episodes would mark me as dismally productive:

In the bank I was working for, the incidence rate of online banking mainframe reIPLs went from every few days to zero.

At a telecommunication provider, data center reIPLs similarly reduced.

Re: Can developer productivity be measured?

#138

Post by byecomputer »

sokoloff wrote: post #32
lkxijlewlf wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, he's unproductive. What he should have done was broke it up into dozens of tiny pieces so that he could inflate his ticket count. It is more acceptable to the spreadsheet to have "Hard problem part 1", "Hard problem part 2", "Hard problem part ...", than it is to simply have "Hard problem" and take longer to do it.

You can measure progress of a military campaign by counting and reporting on “bullets fired” yet that’s not how military strategists operate.

On the other hand, doing busywork is a pretty integral part of being in the military

Re: Can developer productivity be measured?

#140

Post by TameAntelope »

valenterry wrote: post #136
TameAntelope wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The person I replied to asked what the business value was, so I explained that the [business] value comes from having a dedicated person who understands the context in which the issue is being worked.

Sorry, still don't understand. Are you saying that without communicating progress there is no person who understands the context in which the issue is being worked in? That doesn't make sense to me and seems to be totally orthogonal to any communication of progress.

So do you have a problem understanding or do you disagree?
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