Should we measure developer productivity?

About 10 yrs ago, I wrote a web site publish termed “Can we measure developer productiveness?” In it, I reviewed the numerous objective tries that had been made to do it — strains of code, function factors, and so on. I also proposed some subjective steps. Still, the summary was that irrespective of the dreams of KPI-loving managers, there was no practical way to evaluate the productiveness of an individual software program developer.

I point out this report printed 10 decades back simply because matters have improved considerably in the a long time since. When I wrote it, Git and Mercurial have been both of those notable and well-known computer software source management units. I was a software manager at the time, migrating my workforce off of Visual Supply Secure from Microsoft, and we made a decision to go with Mercurial since it was a great deal far more Home windows-helpful.

We picked the completely wrong horse mainly because, in the a long time to arrive, Git would develop into the de facto standard for edition control. As a final result, a cottage industry has arisen all-around Git repositories. GitHub is a massive organization for which Microsoft paid $7.5 billion. Many companies now supply metrics all around your code in Git. And quite a few of those businesses purport to measure the efficiency of application developers.

Gimme metrics

If we concede that it is attainable to measure developer productivity (a proposition that I am not completely offered on), we then ought to check with no matter if we should do that.

The drive to do so is certainly powerful. Administrators want to know who their ideal developers are, and they want metrics that will support them at overall performance evaluation time. HR desires to be in a position to doc functionality problems. CEOs want to know that the cash they are investing is currently being used proficiently.

Even if you use new applications to evaluate specific developer efficiency, those metrics will very likely be gamed. Lines of code is considered a joke metric these times. “You want strains of code? I’ll give you traces of code!” Is number of commits for each working day or common time to 1st PR comment any different? If you evaluate particular person developers on these metrics, they will most unquestionably make improvements to them. But at what expense? Probably at the charge of team productiveness.

An outdated CEO of mine utilized to say that program advancement is a group activity. If individual builders are calculated against each other on any metric, they will get started competing with every other, particularly if money and promotions are on the line. And a group of folks competing from every single other is not a staff.

It is groups, not particular person builders, that get items done in the program organization. Software growth is exciting in that regard. The true coding is typically finest completed by men and women in deep thought, but the perform that happens before and after the code gets published contributes drastically toward building factors productive.

Measure the team

A improvement staff discusses the design and implementation of a offered challenge in advance of any code is penned. When the individual developers produce the code, it is normally with the help of teammates who response thoughts and present insight. All team members evaluation and approve what is performed during code opinions. Everybody works jointly to make factors take place.

The toughness of the team is every single individual member. The energy of every member is the crew. —Phil Jackson, NBA mentor

That is why, as a substitute of measuring personal developer productiveness, it is crew productiveness that ought to be measured. Builders performing collectively as a staff, pushing toward a widespread intention, is what supervisors actually want.

Groups know that if they enhance their staff metrics, they strengthen their results. Teams that can see the benefits of focusing on the right issues and retaining an eye on the right metrics will increase. Groups want to strengthen their productivity. They want to get greater. They want to provide. Measuring team-centered metrics assists them do individuals issues.

10 yrs in the past, I questioned if we need to or even could evaluate developer productiveness. But I was asking the erroneous issue. Unique developers are only as sturdy as their teams. Thoroughly measuring crew metrics sales opportunities a crew toward improved results and improved software program. In its place of measuring folks, we ought to motivate our teams to create program greater and faster by measuring what they do alongside one another.