I personally use Pivotal Tracker's velocity feature. I write a one liner to describe a feature, and assign it a 1, 2, 4, or 8 point value, depending on estimat

I personally use Pivotal Tracker's velocity feature. I write a one liner to describe a feature, and assign it a 1, 2, 4, or 8 point value, depending on estimated difficulty. Tracker will then graph points/time, which is productivity. This lets me keep track of myself over time, but points vary person to person. It's hard to get an exact measurement of productivity, unless you have multiple people do the same sample problems. There is no standard unit of programmer production, because in the real world you should be solving an unsolved problem every time (or using a library).