Measuring Individual Productivity
Mark Mzyk | April 10, 2008
I wish I had more to add to Steve McConnell’s post Measuring Productivity of Individual Programmers, but I don’t.
The short summary: don’t measure productivity of individual programmers. Just don’t. It’s a bad idea that returns you nothing.
He says a follow up post on measuring the productivity of teams is coming (which is something he does recommend). I’m looking forward to what he has to say on that.
Filed in: General,Management.
The funny thing is that monitoring programmer productivity is one of Joel Spolskey’s FogBugz app biggest claim to fame.
I’d never thought of FogBugz that way. I’ve never used it either though.
Raganwald actually addresses some of the same issues in his latest post:
http://weblog.raganwald.com/2008/04/stuffy-dowding.html
I recommend it.
I’ve had a few friends who have used fogbugz for projects and said it was pretty good. Watching the intro video about fogbugz, they really push how it estimates programmer productivity and I was actually really impressed with the algorithm. The only thing is I feel like it’s not worth the effort to even have a feature like that. Arguably the most complex and expensive feature of FogBugz, why would I want to pay for that?