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Comment by gregjor | Hacker News Reader

Can you define developer productivity? Before you can measure something you need to have a definition. Measuring PRs and commits is like measuring a writer’s productivity by how many sheets of paper they use.

A useful metric might be derived from business value added vs. cost of programming effort, but then how well can the organization measure business value? Or the cost of programmer effort?

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Writers do measure productivity by pages written… sure, they may not write a best seller, but there’s a date they start writing and a date the book is published and the book has a word count.

I agree though that lines of code or number of pages doesn’t have much of a relationship to revenue.

Pages and word count are after-the-fact measures and don’t have a relationship to either perceived value or productivity. Nor does the time it takes to write a book. Schedule and length may be imposed by an editor or publisher, just like programmers get from managers.

Code that adds business value (or reduces business costs), delivered within schedule and budget, is what management looks for. But is that What we mean when we programmers talk about productivity? I don’t think so.

Writing is a bad analogy for programming.

In some respects, yes. But both are creative and technical processes that show huge variance in quality and value across writers and programmers. No analogy is perfect but if we intend to measure programmer productivity we can start by looking at how that’s measured in similar activities.

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