Can You Measure Software Developer Productivity?

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: Measuring, tracking, and benchmarking developer productivity has long been considered a black box. It doesn't have to be that way." So begins global management consulting firm McKinsey in Yes, You Can Measure Software Developer Productivity... "Compared with other critical business functions such as sales or customer operations, software development is perennially undermeasured. The long-held belief by many in tech is that it's not possible to do it correctly-and that, in any case, only trained engineers are knowledgeable enough to assess the performance of their peers. "Yet that status quo is no longer sustainable." "All C-suite leaders who are not engineers or who have been in management for a long time will need a primer on the software development process and how it is evolving," McKinsey advises companies starting on a developer productivity initiative. "Assess your systems. Because developer productivity has not typically been measured at the level needed to identify improvement opportunities, most companies' tech stacks will require potentially extensive reconfiguration. For example, to measure test coverage (the extent to which areas of code have been adequately tested), a development team needs to equip their codebase with a tool that can track code executed during a test run." Before getting your hopes up too high over McKinsey's 2023 developer productivity silver bullet suggestions, consider that Googling to "find a tool that can track code executed during a test run" will lead you back to COBOL test coverage tools from the 80's that offered this kind of capability and 40+ year-old papers that offered similar advice (1, 2, 3). A cynic might also suggest considering McKinsey's track record, which has had some notable misses.

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