4 ms·

Number of pull requests can be gamed and hard to measure - easy vs complex tasks. I'm surprised you did not mention anything about Velocity points.

hnrodey 4y ago
I'm not surprised to see your criticism that is missing an alternative way to measure. The answer is not "measuring developer productivity is impossible". Otherwise, I'd challenge you to provide a metric that cannot be gamed. Humans respond to incentives and thus there will always be people that could/will intentionally try to rise above the rest based purely on the measurement.
- taeric 4y ago
  My alternative suggestion would be to worry less about individuals and more worry about if the organization is producing something of value. After that, you can start to pick and prod at the individual contributions if you want, but expect that any team will likely have a step function that is their effectiveness. As such, you may remove the least functioning member of a team, and then find that you dropped the entire team to nothing. It is almost certainly true that there can be drags on the morale of a team. People that are causing things to go slower in detrimental ways. It is also almost certainly true that sometimes having someone around that is just fun to talk to for the rest of the team is enough to keep the entire team functioning.
- nradov 4y ago
  Measuring individual developer productivity is impossible without also creating perverse incentives that destroy business value. The smallest unit you can usefully measure is a single Scrum team (and even at that level most metrics will have wide error bars and a lack of statistical significance).
  - musicale 4y ago
    > Measuring individual developer productivity is impossible without also creating perverse incentives that destroy business value. Probably should be printed at the top and bottom of every page of every performance review.
bluesnowmonkey 4y ago
I agree with hnrodey, and here’s the thing: trying to game this metric is a pretty good way to turn into an actually productive programmer! People who crank out lots of small, easy tasks build up a lot of the very skills they need to take on large, complex projects. Another way to put this is, I’ve never encountered a highly productive programmer whose approach was to occasionally land a big important change. It just doesn’t work out that way.

hnrodey 4y ago

I'm not surprised to see your criticism that is missing an alternative way to measure. The answer is not "measuring developer productivity is impossible". Otherwise, I'd challenge you to provide a metric that cannot be gamed. Humans respond to incentives and thus there will always be people that could/will intentionally try to rise above the rest based purely on the measurement.

taeric 4y ago
My alternative suggestion would be to worry less about individuals and more worry about if the organization is producing something of value. After that, you can start to pick and prod at the individual contributions if you want, but expect that any team will likely have a step function that is their effectiveness. As such, you may remove the least functioning member of a team, and then find that you dropped the entire team to nothing. It is almost certainly true that there can be drags on the morale of a team. People that are causing things to go slower in detrimental ways. It is also almost certainly true that sometimes having someone around that is just fun to talk to for the rest of the team is enough to keep the entire team functioning.
nradov 4y ago
Measuring individual developer productivity is impossible without also creating perverse incentives that destroy business value. The smallest unit you can usefully measure is a single Scrum team (and even at that level most metrics will have wide error bars and a lack of statistical significance).
- musicale 4y ago
  > Measuring individual developer productivity is impossible without also creating perverse incentives that destroy business value. Probably should be printed at the top and bottom of every page of every performance review.

bluesnowmonkey 4y ago

I agree with hnrodey, and here’s the thing: trying to game this metric is a pretty good way to turn into an actually productive programmer! People who crank out lots of small, easy tasks build up a lot of the very skills they need to take on large, complex projects. Another way to put this is, I’ve never encountered a highly productive programmer whose approach was to occasionally land a big important change. It just doesn’t work out that way.