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

more reasons than just reuse.

[RingDev]

Writing for reuse can be excessive, but there are a number of reasons to move in that direction even if you don't intend to reuse that specific code block:

1) Unit Tests. If you abstract your functionality in a way that allows reuse, it also abstracts in for extremely easy unit testing. And unit testing will save you an incredible amount of effort in code maintenance.

2) Consistency. If you follow the same design pattern for all of your abstractions, all of your developers should be familiar with it. This makes it significantly easier for different developers to step into projects as the hopefully don't have to learn another person's style for abstraction.

3) Replacement and isolation. Need to implement a functional change? If your code is abstracted, like it would be for reuse, the functional change is limited to a single block, which is easily identifiable and if you're doing it right, unit-testable.

4) Just in case. Most of the time abstracted code doesn't get reused, and event when it does get reused it's usually a copy and paste job instead of a reference. Even so, if anyone ever does need the same functionality, it allows them to quickly rip off the exact piece they are looking for as opposed to trying to strip out your programs logic to get the tiny bit they want.

-Rick