

Ask HN: How do you measure your software dev productivity? - gamebit07

As a software developer, when you create tools to play around with data, in one form or the other, it does become important to measure one&#x27;s own productivity.<p>There are several tools as rescuetime, harvestapp etc. that tell you how much time you wasted&#x2F;utilized doing what, but then if your code editor is open they say the time was productive.<p>Your code editor being the main window, is by no means a measure of the productivity. Couple of parameters that I have thought are -<p>1. No. of lines of code that you write.<p>2. No. of features that you have implemented.<p>3. No. of bugs that you have solved.<p>4. And the list can go on.<p>But each of the above are pretty subjective terms,  and are not a good measure.<p>Just curious how people measure their software development efficiency.<p>Thanks for reading it.
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crazygringo
It's an important question, but everything I know is, you can't.
Unfortunately.

Writing code, except for the most boring kind of boilerplate, is inherently a
creative process, and neither "final functionality" or "final quality" have
good metrics, let alone metrics that translate into man-hours, lines of code,
or similar.

All you can really do is get a "feel" for someone who seems to be
underperforming, performing at par, or is really a star player. It's just
intuition. Which is really a terrible thing to have to base evaluation on, but
it's really all we've got.

This is probably why group evaluations, like "planning poker" for estimates of
task difficulty, and having the whole group evaluate each of its members (for
promotions, raises, etc.), can be popular -- it's still all intuition, but a
kind of "consensus" intuition performed by people who ought to know best, can
be better than a single person's.

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greenlakejake
Lines of code can be particularly misleading. Read:

-2000 Lines Of Code

[http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story...](http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.txt&characters=Bill%20Atkinson&sortOrder=Sort%20by%20Date&detail=medium)

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mherrmann
Martin Fowler has an interesting article on the subject:
[http://martinfowler.com/bliki/CannotMeasureProductivity.html](http://martinfowler.com/bliki/CannotMeasureProductivity.html)

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js7
What did I ship/implement and how much post implementation support it needed.

