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The Futility of Developer Productivity Metrics
snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister discusses why code analysis and similar metrics provide little insight into what really makes an effective software development team, in the wake of a new scorecard system employed at IBM. 'Code metrics are fine if all you care about is raw code production. But what happens to all that code once it's written? Do you just ship it and move on? Hardly — in fact, many developers spend far more of their time maintaining code than adding to it. Do your metrics take into account time spent refactoring or documenting existing code? Is it even possible to devise metrics for these activities?' McAllister writes. 'Are developers who take time to train and mentor other teams about the latest code changes considered less productive than ones who stay heads-down at their desks and never reach out to their peers? How about teams that take time at the beginning of a project to coordinate with other teams for code reuse, versus those who charge ahead blindly? Can any automated tool measure these kinds of best practices?'"
Application design (have someone think about everything in broad lines, set out a main architecture-model in ADVANCE.)
Iterative design.
A good project manager prioritizing and communicating current development shielding programmer from clients (who during the "waiting time", are fantasizing changes).
In contrast, in debugging and QA, free way between the client and the developer (more efficient and gives more motivation to the dev as to slave for )
Realistic expectations: don't get your devs running around doing "quick" jobs left and right while they're trying to keep a tight schedule.
Keep everybody current: short standup meeting in the morning
Motivate communication; devs tend to get absorbed in their coding-problem (nd prioritize being "productive") but forget to be a team
The right personality on the right segment of a project: developers have their strengths and their weaknesses.
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I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1