Lan Barnes wrote:
Managers are (usually) not stupid and many were once coders.
Unfortunately, they need metrics to drive decision making.
LOC is perhaps the least useful metric possible and can actually be
destructive. It's alos toe metric with the largest body of accumulated
data.
This tells me that most accumulated data on code productivity is BS.
How do you compare 20 lines of assembler with 20 lines of Python?
The closest to an effective metric for managers came up when I was doing
SCRUM. Part of the process with SCRUM is you do estimates in "units".
Units have no root valuation, but over time, as the team gets better at
estimating, you arrive at a decent sense of what a "unit" means in terms
of the particular team in question. You can then use "units/week" to
measure the relative productivity of folks on said team. Of course, it
is tricky to come up with a way to use this to compare programmers
between teams, and even trickier to avoid people gaming the system if
they know you are measuring their performance this way. :-(
--Chris
--
[email protected]
http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
