How to measure productivity of the developers?

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I was on my usual way to the office and suddenly realized that there is a WIFI connection in our public transport. I was just thinking about how to measure productivity of the bus drivers, police officers and more importantly developers. Why not google it if they granted us the free WIFI connection. I found this article. Now I'm confused and not sure if to continue reading How to Measure Anything :-)
How to measure productivity of the developers? It seems that I asked a wrong question. The right one had to be: “Is it even possible to measure productivity of developers?” But if we can’t reasonably measure that, how can we reward people for doing their work better? Actually how is “doing work better” defined and who is the person that can say whose results are better? If we are rewarding better results, aren’t we destroying their intrinsic motivation?

I have asked one simple question and got others instead of an answer. So I’ll ask one more: “Are you able to answer any of them?”
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Antonin Moravec

Hi, I'm the Project Manager at Kentico. My main interests are project management - especially the Agile one and Soft Skills. I’m looking forward to discuss a wide range of topics related to our projects.

Comments

Anthony Moravec commented on

Thank you for your comments Mufasa!

Ondrej that is actually the article which made me write this post. ;-)

Ondrej Bohaciak commented on

http://www.martinfowler.com/bliki/CannotMeasureProductivity.html by Martin Fowler

Mufasa commented on

According to "Making Software" (https://www.amazon.com/dp/0596808321/ref=as_li_ss_til?tag=firetigernet-20&camp=0&creative=0&linkCode=as4&creativeASIN=0596808321&adid=0BH8Z8Y9J8CCC4HE7KPN&), the answer is no. Though lines of code is the only semi-marginal one that seems to work, but only if the developers don't _know_ that's how they're being measured. (If they do, the problem as mentioned in the "CannotMeasureProductivity" article applies.)

And according to "Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us" by Dan Pink (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc), rewards and motivation work together to a point, but not beyond; in summary, they don't for a task as complicated as developing code.