My thought was that judging productivity by lines of code or by tests written (whatever the quality) is judging by what was done rather than by what should be d

My thought was that judging productivity by lines of code or by tests written (whatever the quality) is judging by what was done rather than by what should be done. An extreme example of this sort of thing would be a programmer who looks at what needs to be done and says: "We don't need to write ANY code there's an open source app/library for doing exactly what we need here." By making that suggestion it's quite possible that they've saved their company months of work (versus implementing everything themselves). However, in a purely Number of Tests written * Quality of tests metric they're a miserable failure. I think TDD and tests are a solid way to write software, but I don't think they're a great way to judge programmer productivity.