Resource
- https://martinfowler.com/bliki/CannotMeasureProductivity.html
Key Points
In particular we have no way of reasonably measuring productivity. Neither LOC nor FP reflecting business value. FP -> Accurate? -> Reusable Functions (Internal/External) -> Right Functions Built? -> Functions Are Equally Valuable?
Some people say "if you can't measure it, you can't manage it". That's a cop out. Businesses manage things they can't really measure the value of all the time. How do you measure the productivity of a company's lawyers, its marketing department, an educational institution?
So not just is business value hard to measure, there's a time lag too. It seems that economists are now seeing productivity increases in business due to the computer investments in the nineties. The point is that the improvements lag the investments
If we could do it we could assess software much more easily and objectively than we can now. But false measures only make things worse. This is somewhere I think we have to admit to our ignorance.
If team productivity is hard to figure out, it's even harder to measure the contribution of individuals on that team. You can get a rough sense of a team's output by looking at how many features they deliver per iteration. It's a crude sense, but you can get a sense of whether a team's speeding up, or a rough sense if one team is more productive than another. But individual contributions are much harder to assess. While some people may be responsible for implementing features, others may play a supporting role - helping others to implement their features. Their contribution is that they are raising the whole team's productivity - but it's very hard to get a sense of their individual output unless you are a developer on that team.