Developer Productivity

A pervasive belief in the field of software engineering is that some programmers are much, much better than others (the times-10, or x10, programmer), and that the skills, abilities, and talents of these programmers exert an outsized influence on that organisation’s success or failure. The metric generally used is productivity, which is defined as “the effectiveness of productive effort, especially in industry, as measured in terms of the rate of output per unit of input.” Which means that the amount of time you spent working is not productivity but the amount of work you got done.

Therefore, developer Productivity can be described as a concept, set of tools or processes, or a team that is dedicated to enhancing the efficiency of other developers with the goal of allowing them to increase their overall output. In my personal experience, there were many cases where there was a misconception that people who stay late in office are doing more work than the person who leaves early (in the world of pre-corona with no WFH privileges), which is not a good factor to consider for measuring productivity, there are many factors to be considered while improving productivity such as distractions, software development tools,

So, how do you measure productivity? Considering that the method should be scalable and there is no one single metric that covers all factors affect productivity, Better and reliable results can be seen when each metric is separately measured which could be through surveys or logs analysis and using qualitative studies to provide the narrative and make recommendations on improving productivity. Focusing on smaller scoped questions with actionable results such as is a particular tool or a service helping or hampering a person’s productivity by the value it brings and the time being spent it, which cannot be the only metrics but can be one of the metrics used to measure productivity. These kind of smaller metrics contribute towards the large goal of measuring productivity and can give some reliable results to act upon to improve the productivity.

During this pandemic period, the productivity metrics used traditionally were not as effective as the pre-corona period, and there was a need to start developing new methods to measure productivity while considering the working from home everyday situation. Research showed that there are new factors which contributed to both positive side and the negative side of productivity, where positive factors include having time with family and flexibility in works whereas the negative factors include distractions and mental/ physical health issues. Interesting measures such as no meeting Friday, meetings staring late and frequent well being checkins, to maximise factors that improve productivity.

As a conclusion, we can say that despite having to deal with a pandemic and keeping up the productivity, researchers have shown new ways that measure and improve developers productivity. In future, when the pandemic ends and the work culture come back to normal, these new ways still might help us measure and improve developers productivity.