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?'"

Comments

It's tricky

[LunaticTippy]

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.

Re:It's tricky

[abroadwin]

Or you could just communicate with your developers, be aware of the work they're doing and judge their performance based on their effective productivity from your perspective. I've heard this called "management" before, but I know that word has been twisted to mean something more sinister as of late.

Re:It's tricky

[ackthpt]

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.

In my book there are only three ways to measure code:

• For speed
• For size
• For readability

Emphasis on any one and the others suffer. They're goal should be on bug-free code which meets a spec. Writing code is like practicing medicine, every patient is different and has its own demands.

Re:It's tricky

[icebraining]

So, you want to reward Wally? He probably doesn't introduce much bugs...

Re:It's tricky

[nine-times]

Yeah, I've come to realize that nobody understands what a manager is supposed to do anymore. Most people's concept is that managers exist to play the part of the PHB, but they don't do anything useful.

More and more, I think no one even understands the value of having a knowledgeable person make difficult decisions based on well thought-out judgments. People want procedures that they can just give to anyone and assume that the outcome will be the same, and then they want metrics that they can use to measure the outcome without knowing anything about the situation.

The proper role of a manager-- aside from particular responsibilities he/she might have on top of this-- is to understand the people working for him and understand his unit's role in the greater context of the company, and then to eliminate obstacles that prevent the people working for him from performing their roles. This might mean protecting the people that work for you from upper management, it might mean recognizing and rewarding good performance, or it might mean all sorts of other things. But to do it right, it takes a lot of work and it takes good judgment.

Problem

[bigsexyjoe]

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.

Pfft

[Allicorn]

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.

lazy management

[J-1000]

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.

Re:Measure the objective not the code

[MadKeithV]

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.

I am also REALLY happy to have "that guy" that has absolutely shit productivity, but somehow manages to pick up on every time a "solution" is proposed by the rest of the team to a problem that doesn't exist or doesn't matter, and stops THEM from being really efficient at doing the wrong thing.
I'm also really happy to have "that girl" that doesn't seem to really be doing anything, but take her out of the team and everyone else starts floundering because she's actually constantly helping them be a lot more productive.
"Meeting the objective" is actually potentially just as bad as any other metric, because it depends on how you define the objective, and meeting it. What the customer asked? What the customer wanted? Or what the customer actually needed?