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"I didn't realize how slowly I was working until I worked with a YCombinator company. I was making about 6-8 commits/day; they setup a new Subversion repository

by boucher 18y ago

"I didn't realize how slowly I was working until I worked with a YCombinator company. I was making about 6-8 commits/day; they setup a new Subversion repository 2 days ago and it's already on revision 100." Subversion commit rate is an abysmal measure of work speed.

nostrademons 18y ago
They are, but nearly everything else is more abysmal. What else do you measure, lines of code/day? Hours spent working? Bugs fixed? New files created? The nice thing about svn commits is that if you're doing atomic commits (and both organizations were, though I got a little sloppy about it with GameClay), 1 commit ~= 1 feature. There're still issues about what you consider a feature - if you do a feature right the first time and then check it in, is that better than if you check in a barely-working rough cut, then a couple UI enhancements, then some bugfixes for things you should've gotten right the first time? But those issues would crop up no matter how you try to measure forward progress.
- tjr 18y ago
  What else do you measure, lines of code/day? Hours spent working? Bugs fixed? New files created? Joy.
- boucher 18y ago
  I don't think there is one specific metric. It seems like SVN commits would be more accurate than LOC, but when I hear numbers like that, I begin to seriously doubt it. You have to take a lot of things into consideration when trying to measure "forward progress". In theory all of our commits are approximately one feature, and I can't, for the life of me, imagine finishing 100 features in 2 days (even split between all three of my team). Clearly there's some disconnect between what different people consider to be a feature. For the record, we've made a little over 1000 commits in the last five and a half months. I certainly don't think that makes us 20 times less productive.
  - curiousgeorge 18y ago
    Good measure of how on-page the team is though. It bothers me when developers aren't working on hard problems and fail to make frequent commits. They are used to working in isolation and without scrutiny. Unless people are actively breaking things they should be updating.

by boucher 18y ago

nostrademons 18y ago

They are, but nearly everything else is more abysmal. What else do you measure, lines of code/day? Hours spent working? Bugs fixed? New files created? The nice thing about svn commits is that if you're doing atomic commits (and both organizations were, though I got a little sloppy about it with GameClay), 1 commit ~= 1 feature. There're still issues about what you consider a feature - if you do a feature right the first time and then check it in, is that better than if you check in a barely-working rough cut, then a couple UI enhancements, then some bugfixes for things you should've gotten right the first time? But those issues would crop up no matter how you try to measure forward progress.

tjr 18y ago
What else do you measure, lines of code/day? Hours spent working? Bugs fixed? New files created? Joy.
boucher 18y ago
I don't think there is one specific metric. It seems like SVN commits would be more accurate than LOC, but when I hear numbers like that, I begin to seriously doubt it. You have to take a lot of things into consideration when trying to measure "forward progress". In theory all of our commits are approximately one feature, and I can't, for the life of me, imagine finishing 100 features in 2 days (even split between all three of my team). Clearly there's some disconnect between what different people consider to be a feature. For the record, we've made a little over 1000 commits in the last five and a half months. I certainly don't think that makes us 20 times less productive.
- curiousgeorge 18y ago
  Good measure of how on-page the team is though. It bothers me when developers aren't working on hard problems and fail to make frequent commits. They are used to working in isolation and without scrutiny. Unless people are actively breaking things they should be updating.