3 ms·
Productivity is a factor of efficiency and effectiveness. Efficiency being the measurement of how fast things get done, and effectiveness a measure of how well
by matthiaswh 16y ago
Productivity is a factor of efficiency and effectiveness. Efficiency being the measurement of how fast things get done, and effectiveness a measure of how well things get done (meeting the requirements, including all features, number of bugs/issues that crop up, quality of code).
This is essentially the same thing you are saying, just broken down. Still, it's difficult (not impossible) to measure one programmer against the next in terms of productivity. Using these metrics it is quite possible to measure a programmer against himself over time.
The problem is that measuring the necessary factors affects the level of productivity being measured.
- dean 16y ago"This is essentially the same thing you are saying, just broken down." Actually, I took his meaning as productivity being only a measure of how fast the work gets done, your efficiency, and not of how well the code is written, your effectiveness. His comment: "And that doesn't take into account maintenance.", implies to me that code quality is not a factor. Unfortunately, this is the measure that seems to predominate, especially with non-technical managers. If it takes twice as long to do it right, all the non-technical manager sees is that it took twice as long. The subsequent reduction in maintenance time and cost from doing it right doesn't seem to get noticed. Of course, the ideal is to get the job done fast and right.
- ultrasaurus 16y agoSo much of it comes down to managers not being able to tell good code from bad. If you look at quality as a crapshoot (it's genuinely hard to tell architecture astronauts from good code) then indeterminate quality quickly beats indeterminate quality slowly.