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geekjock | 2 years ago
You can't measure developer productivity objectively, assuming you're referring to metrics like lines of code, number of pull requests, or velocity points which are infamous. There's broad agreement on this both within the research community as well as practitioners at leading tech companies.
Here are some examples: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/measuring-develop...
"... and what distinguishes 'good devex' from 'bad devex'"
Yes to this. This is an ongoing effort - we have two previous journal papers that touch on this which may be of interest to you:
- https://getdx.com/research/devex-what-actually-drives-produc...
- https://getdx.com/research/conceptual-framework-for-develope...
vlovich123|2 years ago
No those are metrics you’re suggesting. There are better ones as someone else mentioned (time to get code from PR to production, some way of measuring the quality of work getting to production, etc). Yes, the obvious metrics are poor and better metrics are difficult to measure and quantify. And obviously no single metric is going to capture something as multidimensional as code development.
Also, the link you reference doesn’t support your argument.
> Across the board, all companies shared that they use both qualitative and quantitative measures
Throughout it discusses that people do use quantitative metrics to help guide their analysis and none of them try to do the obviously naive ones as mentioned.
This isn’t intended as a critique, but as an engineering profession anything that isn’t quantifiable means it’s open to interpretation and argument weakening forward progress to be restricted to what becomes adopted as industry standard which is in many ways more of a popularity contest of fads rather than concrete technical improvement.
geekjock|2 years ago