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That's not really true. You can look at developer velocity and bug fix rates, to name a couple of readily available metrics. It would not be some big mystery if
by abalone 10y ago
That's not really true. You can look at developer velocity and bug fix rates, to name a couple of readily available metrics. It would not be some big mystery if open plan was killing productivity.
Also, it does not explain why a "beancounter" mindset about office space would be paired with lavish expenses on free lunches and other de rigueur amenities in said offices, as is typical of open plan startups. Conclusion: it's not a beancounter mentality that drives the decision.
- ZenoArrow 10y ago> "You can look at developer velocity and bug fix rates, to name a couple of readily available metrics." How? If an office starts out open plan (which many of them do), are you going to move to new offices just to test the theory that it'll make your employees more productive? Plus, bug fix rates are a bad metric, bugs are not equal in complexity, and even if you try and guess at the complexity before working on a bug that's only an estimate, and one that doesn't take into account other important factors such as the level of churn in the codebase and the level of familiarity the developer has with the part of the codebase they are asked to fix.
- abalone 10y agoThere are plenty of companies that have shifted formats, and a gross change in productivity would show up in those metrics.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- ZenoArrow 10y agoWhich metrics? There aren't any accurate ones I know of. Anecdotal evidence is possible, but I don't see how programmer productivity can be measured with scientific rigour.
- douche 10y agoJust because you have to do something that is suboptimal when you're starting out because of resource constraints, doesn't mean that you should enshrine that sub-optimal situation as ideal. As an absurd example, Jobs and Woz made the first Apple computers in a garage. When they started making some actual money and could afford something better, they didn't insist on their engineers all working in garages. Open offices are very reminiscent of the kind of environment that I remember from college, where the default studying option seemed to be going to the library, staking out a seat at a big table, building a fort of books, and "studying," with the emphasis on appearing studious and some sort of bizarre status hierarchy about how many hours you held station there.
- abalone 10y agoThe new Apple campus, designed by Jobs, will be open plan. http://iphone.appleinsider.com/articles/16/10/06/apple-to-unite-internet-teams-under-one-roof-at-1-infinite-loop---report http://iphone.appleinsider.com/articles/16/10/06/apple-to-un...
- Can_Not 10y agoWhat if there is an increase in bug fixes because the open office decreased the quality of work resulting in more bugs?
- crdoconnor 10y ago>You can look at developer velocity Developer velocity compares what you thought the complexity of a problem was vs how much time it actually takes. It conflates the level of optimism with the speed of development and glosses over how complex the stories should be. Smart developers get overly pessimistic when pointing stories if they're measured by developer velocity rather than actual business value delivered because it makes them seem faster. >and bug fix rates Last time that metric was taken seriously developers deliberately inserted bugs.
- ams6110 10y agoPretty much any development metric that drives some kind of reward will be gamed (maybe even unconsciously) by the developers. It's just basic psychology.
- abalone 10y agoThose are issues with tying compensation and performance evaluation to metrics, not with detecting changes in them due to office environments.