You can measure productivity just fine on any tasks that repeat. How long does it take you to run the right tests, find the implementation for a failing test case, make a merge request, create a patch release, pull up the logs in case of an incident? All these tasks repeat over and over again and a good developed can do them much quicker.
Can developer productivity be measured?
91–100 of 159 posts
Re: Can developer productivity be measured?
#92In every organization I've worked in, it was obvious who the high performers were and who the low performers were. It was obvious to everyone. The only blind spots were people usually seriously misjudged their own performance.
The problem, however, is that management is always being pushed to make objective measurements. For example, to fire someone, you have to first put him on an improvement plan with objective measurements. Otherwise, you're wide open to a lawsuit over discrimination, etc. You have to prove to a judge someone isn't performing, or that you gave raises based on performance.
Management also gets pushed into these attempts at objective measurements by attempts to optimize the numbers like what works great for a manufacturing process.
Re: Can developer productivity be measured?
#93It is pretty ironic how much time is wasted on trying measure developer productivity.
Why is it ironic? The stakeholders for increased developer productivity go beyond just developers. Even the slightest increase in developer productivity, let alone the ability to objectively measure it, is the holy grail of software development. Companies with access to nearly infinite resources can and would deploy them for a marginal gain in developer productivity. So much emphasis is spent on hiring the most brilliant minds and then on managing their projects and time so why not on optimizing their output.
Re: Can developer productivity be measured?
#94The problem is that we do not have a standard "output unit." > Productivity: the effectiveness of productive effort, especially in industry, as measured in terms of the rate of output per unit of input. We can all agree "lines of code" is a shit metric, and we can't say "# of bugs closed," because each will have variable difficulty and value. Programmers employed by a business are in charge of automating repetitive t…
Even worse, # of bugs closed may be measuring the inverse of what you think you are. See the classic Dilbert cartoon about "writing yourself a new minivan".
I actually had an employee that would write up highly convoluted big reports that I just couldn't understand. he would close them a week later - sometimes with a meaningless patch, sometimes without. couldn't fire him - he was my cofounders toady.
the only reason I beat him on 'bugs fixed' is that one of my jobs was to dig through the old issues and remove them if they weren't clear or relevant.
Re: Can developer productivity be measured?
#95I have never felt my individual productivity go up. It feels like as I progress my individual work stays the same, but helping others eats any efficiency gains I personally make. As if when you are new to a module, you are slow because you don’t know anything, then once you have expertise, you are slow because you know everything and are helping others. Would be interesting to measure this somehow.
This is the only way you can scale your time, by ramping up others to be as efficient as you are. Although you might be becoming less of a contributor individually, you are enabling the larger group. This type of productivity can definitely be tracked based on how many people you have helped and their corresponding lineage of knowledge and work output.
Re: Can developer productivity be measured?
#96Any decently competent technical leader can tell if a developer is being productive or not. It's stupid to waste time trying to measure something that is virtually unmeasurable.
"It's unmeasurable, but everyone can tell." is that what you're saying? Seems like a No True Scotsman fallacy to say only good technical leaders can tell if a developer is being productive and in the same breath say it's unmeasurable. hours worked, bugs fixed, tickets closed, costs saved, clients saved, KPIs/OKRs hit, time in queue, hours-to-close-ticket, uptime, SLAs hit... surely some collection of indicators, whil…
All of your indicators mean absolutely nothing if you do not measure the difficulty of the tasks submitted. Do that, then we can talk.
It's like saying, "your productivity as a carpenter is how many houses you build in a year" while refusing to take into account how big or complex to build are those houses.
Re: Can developer productivity be measured?
#97love the classic 'are story points hours / no / then wtf are they' conversation when PMs intro jira + cousins
have never been sure how summing together something that is supposed to have no relationship with time magically provides an estimate of anything
also not sure why teams are using the central source of truth for progress as the 'daily todo list making' tool
I live in the real world so I estimate in hours
Re: Can developer productivity be measured?
#98Any decently competent technical leader can tell if a developer is being productive or not. It's stupid to waste time trying to measure something that is virtually unmeasurable.
"It's unmeasurable, but everyone can tell." is that what you're saying? Seems like a No True Scotsman fallacy to say only good technical leaders can tell if a developer is being productive and in the same breath say it's unmeasurable. hours worked, bugs fixed, tickets closed, costs saved, clients saved, KPIs/OKRs hit, time in queue, hours-to-close-ticket, uptime, SLAs hit... surely some collection of indicators, whil…
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Re: Can developer productivity be measured?
#99The only way to do it I can think of: have two teams or individuals develop the same thing simultaneously and measure the time required to get a result of the same quality. This should be done in longer term to take into account code quality (poor code quality slows down future development).
I did this once for a medium complexity task. The quality ended up the same because both developers had good taste. One developer took 2 hours for the job, the other took 2 weeks. And people don’t believe in 10x developers...
Re: Can developer productivity be measured?
#100Most developers like solving problems - this gives them high. Often, without realizing it, they create problems they are eager to solve to get their dose. Solving problems can be quantified, too. Unfortunately, it's hard to quantify the number of problems avoided by manifesting! Often this goes against the first goal I mentioned. For example, solving one problem 10 times gives you closing 10 tickets, making 10 PRs, and contributing a lot more LOCs in a short amount of time. But creating one PR and one ticket, which not only prevents those 10 but 100s and 1,000s more in the future, is quantified as "less work." I've had this at one job recently where every time I suggested fixing a repeated issue was answered with: "We have a bigger fish to fry." Yet, we kept wasting time frying tadpoles.