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There's No Such Thing as Software Productivity (2012)

benrady.com

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Re: There's No Such Thing as Software Productivity (2012)

#41

Post by pjs_ »

In the scenario described in the article, Peter and Paul both achieve the same outcome in the same wall clock time. Obviously they are equivalently productive despite different working styles, by construction.

But this doesn't account for the more realistic examples of Prakash, who completely fails to deliver a working solution, or delivers half a solution, and Percy, who gets it done two weeks late. I'm pretty sure you can define a shit_done/time_elapsed productivity metric for those two guys that is worse than that of Peter and Paul.

Maybe I am a cynic but I suspect that some people are upvoting this because the framing makes them feel OK about getting paid six figures to work three hours a day...

Re: There's No Such Thing as Software Productivity (2012)

#42

Post by eacapeisfutuile »

strulovich wrote: post #12
johnfn wrote: post #9

I'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…

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…

As already mentioned, people measure value return by revenue gain. It is irrelevant to attribute it to some construct like a line of code.

Re: There's No Such Thing as Software Productivity (2012)

#43

Post by dfabulich »

strulovich wrote: post #12
johnfn wrote: post #9

I'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…

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…

I recommend measuring job satisfaction instead of developer productivity. It's the "least bad" proxy metric I know of. https://redfin.engineering/measure-job-satisfaction-instead-...

Re: There's No Such Thing as Software Productivity (2012)

#44

Post by WgaqPdNr7PGLGVW »

johnfn wrote: post #32
n_ary wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it kind of massages our ego, like yes, they can measure other sorts of productivity, but not ours, oh no, we're too complex and intelligent, there's no way to measure the deep sorts of work that we do! Which, yes, OK, we're not exactly bricklayers, but surely, if you had to, you could do better. Productivity is not a cut-n-dry stat for any kind of knowledge work. For an admin, we could say they were more productive…

> To take your envy(I sense it on the quoted remark) to another place, think about how you go about measuring productivity of a CEO, PO, PM, Scrum Master, Agilist/Agile-Specialist etc? I have no envy; I'm a software engineer as well. I just don't seem to struggle, as others claim to, in measuring productivity. I find it fairly straightforward to see that some people are more productive than others, at least in my wor…

> I just don't seem to struggle, as others claim to, in measuring productivity.

Because you are measuring at a very broad and basic level.

Steve is more productive than Susan.

Great. How much more productive? Can you turn it into a number?

Can you still do it consistently when Steve and Susan are in different teams in different parts of the organisation trying to achieve different goals?

I've done DB upgrades that took 10 minutes and I've done DB upgrades that took 3-4 months. What changed was not my productivity but the nature of the problem. Yet from the outside they were both just DB upgrades.

If Susan had done the DB upgrade in 12 weeks could we confidently claim that Steve could have done it in 11 weeks? Steve hasn't even done a DB upgrade since he joined the company. Perhaps Steve could have done it in 10 minutes?

Re: There's No Such Thing as Software Productivity (2012)

#45

Post by [deleted] »

dfabulich wrote: post #43
strulovich wrote: post #12

Earlier 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…

I recommend measuring job satisfaction instead of developer productivity. It's the "least bad" proxy metric I know of. https://redfin.engineering/measure-job-satisfaction-instead-...

[deleted]

Re: There's No Such Thing as Software Productivity (2012)

#46

Post by Rury »

Buttons840 wrote: post #25
voidhorse wrote: post #6

You can say this about any discipline. The root of the issue is that productivity for productivity's sake is meaningless, and it makes no sense to measure productivity as a general property when outputs vary . A tire factory has a distinct, singular goal: produce tires. It does this continually. Productivity is meaningful, but only in relation to a target that is typically specified by externalities (e.g. amount of d…

Isn't the output, the singular goal, always money? (As sad as that may be.)

Money is just a means to obtain goods and services. So no... money isn't really the goal.

Re: There's No Such Thing as Software Productivity (2012)

#47

Post by nomel »

nemomarx wrote: post #19
strulovich wrote: post #12

Earlier 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…

profit generated I think is the high level one, and then you want to dig from there into how much the software development contributed to this.

That's very tricky thing to quantify, especially with "unsung heroes". If my work is in preventing problems, the guy that fixes problems will be seen as the one that contributes more to profit, since impact is directly observed/measured.

This is something that one of the orgs I worked for eventually realized. The people f'ing up, and then fixing their mistakes, were the ones getting promotions/bonuses/raises, because they were the ones interacting with all the execs.

Re: There's No Such Thing as Software Productivity (2012)

#50

Post by nradov »

johnfn wrote: post #9

I'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…

Function point analysis works well enough for measuring software productivity in most domains, provided that quality is held constant. Like other software productivity metrics it's only meaningful at the level of a complete product team and worse than useless for evaluating individual team members.

https://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/32.44364

So you can measure productivity with a reasonable level of accuracy and consistency, but then what? For most organizations it's not actionable so calculating that metric ends up as another form of waste.

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