61–70 of 145 posts
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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.
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> 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 to…
If Steve and Susan are in different part of organization, the answer is "cannot compare". If they are doing different job, the answer is the same.
But every once in a while there is a scenarios when you can compare people easily.
There has a weekly rotation to be an support person for other team. During his week, John always answers questions quickly and to the team's satisfaction. Meanwhile James struggles to answer them and cannot troubleshoot product his team is writing. This has been going on for multiple months and hundreds of questions for each, so it's not "bad week" unlucky or fluke. We now know who is better at answering questions about product.
John and James are doing DB migrations, they did many dozens of them. The migrations are assigned randomly. But John is usually finishing his migrations with no problems, while James often caused outages or missing data. A few times James took over two months to migrate, so the task was taken from him and given to John. John had to discard everything James did and migrate everything from scratch. Now there is a migration for a very important client and CEO is fed up with random assignment.. who is he going to choose?
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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.
I suppose in the context of this thread, we can look at the productivity of a system that includes money or does not.
A small system, like a tire production line, can measure its productivity in terms of money, which is outside the system. But a large system, like society, includes money, and cannot measure its own productivity using internal things.
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> 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…
The ability to look productive is a different skill. The ability to create any impression is a skill some have. Creating fires and putting them out like a hero is another skill. What are your eyes measuring? Are you being fooled?
For other teams yeah, it's harder, or maybe even impossible if the teams are isolated.
I think this is just a semantic quibble based on a narrow interpretation of the word "produce". Because it also means: "cause (a particular result or situation) to happen or exist."
> You seem to be playing a definition word game. [...] Obviously productivity does approximate business value in a very meaningful way when it is defined in terms of delivered business value.
Then the author responds
> Martin asserts "any true measure of software development productivity must be based on delivered business value". I agree, and I propose there is no such thing. We're better off dropping metaphors altogether and just talking about what programmers do: Solve problems.
So I guess the author wants to replace the term "software productivity" with something like "problem-solving productivity, measured in terms of business value"...? Kind of silly IMO, but to each his own.
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Seems to me you’re talking about measuring software. Once we pick a measure though, we can calculate output/input (productivity). Imagine two people tasked with producing the same software, or software satisfying the same requirements or test suite. What would you call the person who produces it faster? More productive? Measuring software in financial terms or lines of code might not be the right measurement of softw…
You’re responding to the headline, not the article. The article has a plainly stated thesis: “Even if it could be measured, productivity in software does not approximate business value in any meaningful way”
The article argues that lines-of-code is bad metric, and no one argues about this.
thuanao proposes measuring "number of completed projects", and I think it's a pretty good metric in some situations which don't involve long-term maintenance.
One example I can come up with is data science: two engineers are given identical requirements to ingest the data (once) and calculate certain metrics. If the assignments are identical, we can calculate and compare their productivity, in "projects/month"
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…
Wherein the work isn't repeating existing work no such measure should be expected to exist.
Any creative work is going to suffer from the same problem.
If you asked a brick layer to develop a better workflow for his fellows to work more effectively in a particular sitiation it would be the same. Are you going to measure words per minute?
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…