About 10 years ago, I wrote a blog post called “Can we measure developer productivity?” In it, I discussed the many objective attempts that had been made to do it — lines of code, function points, etc. I also proposed some subjective measures. Still, the conclusion was that despite the desires of KPI-loving managers, there was no viable way to measure the productivity of an individual software developer.
I mention this article published 10 years ago because things have changed significantly in the years since. When I wrote it, Git and Mercurial were both prominent and popular software source control systems. I was a software manager at the time, migrating my team off of Visual Source Safe from Microsoft, and we decided to go with Mercurial because it was much more Windows-friendly.
