Slashdot Mirror
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?'"
Refactor, refactor, refactor
KISS technology, nothing beats it.
Whatever you measure will be gamed. Measure bugs fixed, and you will find people wasting time listing each tiny variation of a bug. Measure lines of code, you will get spaghetti code.
It almost seems better to measure a bunch of things and use a secret formula to determine productivity.
Man, you really need that seminar!
But what happens to all that code once it's written? Do you just ship it and move on? Do your metrics take into account time spent refactoring or documenting existing code? Is it even possible to devise metrics for these activities? 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?
It bitrots. Yes. No. Maybe. Probably. Definitely. Possibly.
A lot of problems rating developer productivity. First, if a system is that good, then managers won't be able to game it to play favorites. Second, writing code for future use is always harder than writing code specific to the problem. Third, almost any metric is going to penalize a simpler solution. (Keep in mind that once you see a simple solution it seems obvious and everyone thinks they'd think of it. Fourth, evaluating developers well would require making the best coders managers, and that rarely happens for several reasons.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
Wouldn't it be the project leader who monitors these on an individual basis? If a coder isn't pulling their weight its up to the project leader to address it up to the point of termination. Above that you have a suit who monitors the project leader's team performance and decides how well the project leader is doing. Of all the places layered management doesn't work, coding is not one of them. It's a challenge to hold a developer accountable because there are so many different approaches to the same problem in coding and a lot have definitive pros and cons.
Can any automated tool measure these kinds of best practices?
No. The - for the sake of politeness, let's call them "people" - who invested time and effort into devising these schemes have actually built a complete chain of negative productivity by doing so. Remarkable.
OMG!!! Ponies!!!
Personally I am always happy with the guy who can get things done with one line of code instead of a hundred, but what I really care about is that objective is met and we don't have a host of bugs that require 10 times the cost of the development just to maintain. Its not hard stuff but it does require common sense and a hard nosed attitude both of which can be scarce commodities these days.
If they know their productivity is being measured, it becomes a contest to see who can cook the books the best anyway.
This all comes down to lazy, gutless management. Why take the time to get to know Dave and monitor the quality of Dave's work when we can just look at a spreadsheet at the end of the month? Managers prefer to tinker with automatic analysis software rather than manage.
Which is more fun, getting a better handle on what Dave is doing, or researching fancy new software tools that might get you all sorts of praise from metric-craving executives?
Dave's job, which was once about creating a quality product, now shifts to merely satisfying the metrics.
Metrics are valuable if you do the same thing repeatedly. If you build a new building that is like the previous one, you can collect metrics and compare your performance against history. If you write the same search algorithm again and again, you can collect metrics and compare to see how your performance changes over time. Of course, with software, you never repeat. Somewhere around the third time, you move it into some form of library, reuse it, and start on a fresh problem. Perhaps metrics are helpful in some situations, such if your team keeps repeating the same mistakes, you might find similarity in those mistakes (code smells.) There are plenty of people working on these problems and tools. But, from a management point of view, if you keep doing the same thing, you are doing it wrong, and code metrics are not going to help much.
I don't get the concept of everything needing to be quantified. Does the team accomplish what the goals of having the team are? Does it get developed in a fair timeframe? Is everyone on the team pulling their own weight, or are there complaints of someone slacking off? In the end if the product works then the team is doing well, if the product isn't there should be at least one hybrid manager/coder that actually works with the team members sees who is committing what and can tell off the bat if there is or isn't a weak link dragging the rest down. Actually putting a pen and paper number on a complex project is silly. Do authors get judged by the number of pages they write in a day, no they get paid by the success or failure of the book. You can't judge by the number of lines of code, bugs per line ratio or anything like that, because it is all subjective and has little to no bearing on the end product.
And every developer starts as an engineer, and ends as an artist. As simple as that. The engineer can do anything, but have not done it yet. The artist knows what to NOT DO, because he has already done it, and does not wanna to repeat all the teenage mistakes again. The artist just gives you the solution. End of story.
It's easier to just refactor for re-use after the fact than try to design upfront for something that might someday never happen.
And the "reusable" version very often isn't reusable at all, since the original coder didn't properly envision what other use cases would look like.