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Re:Can developer productivity be measured? by burade on Friday December 11, 2020 @09:24AM (#25386107)
Any decently competent technical leader can tell if a developer is being productive or not. It's stupid to waste time trying to measure something that is virtually unmeasurable.
Re:Can developer productivity be measured? by NortySpock on Friday December 11, 2020 @10:32AM (#25386834)
"It's unmeasurable, but everyone can tell." is that what you're saying?

Seems like a No True Scotsman fallacy to say only good technical leaders can tell if a developer is being productive and in the same breath say it's unmeasurable.

hours worked, bugs fixed, tickets closed, costs saved, clients saved, KPIs/OKRs hit, time in queue, hours-to-close-ticket, uptime, SLAs hit... surely some collection of indicators, while not a pure signal, would let you highlight outliers either above or below the curve.

Re:Can developer productivity be measured? by astrobe_ on Friday December 11, 2020 @05:06PM (#25391932)
All of your indicators mean absolutely nothing if you do not measure the difficulty of the tasks submitted. Do that, then we can talk.

It's like saying, "your productivity as a carpenter is how many houses you build in a year" while refusing to take into account how big or complex to build are those houses.

Re:Can developer productivity be measured? by valenterry on Friday December 11, 2020 @10:40AM (#25386920)
The funny thing is, except for "tickets closed" and maybe "costs saved" there is no metric here you can directly attribute to a single developer, and probably not even a team.

Even "hours worked". What do you mean, hours spent in the office? How do you know the person was not drinking coffee or staring at their code in thought of something else.

That being said, I think your metrics are good. And even single developers should be measured by them (which means all developers get measured by the same metric and get the same value). Why? Because it helps the business of SLAs are hit, no matter why they are hit.

Re:Can developer productivity be measured? by mwigdahl on Friday December 11, 2020 @03:45PM (#25390741)
Even crude metrics can be useful as a signal to focus attention on a potential problem area. At that point more complex heuristics can be applied.
Re:Can developer productivity be measured? by rajacombinator on Friday December 11, 2020 @10:53AM (#25387078)
What would all those managers we hired at high salaries do then?