There’s an unhealthy obsession with corporations on the lookout for a option to measure developer productiveness.
During the last 20 years, I’ve led multidisciplinary know-how groups throughout a few of Australia’s largest enterprises. Most not too long ago, I led the event of an inner growth platform, supporting the expertise of over 7,000 engineers as an govt supervisor on the Commonwealth Financial institution of Australia. Right this moment, I lead the DevOps Evangelism staff at Atlassian, the place I recurrently meet with Fortune 500 corporations, touring the world sharing insights and steering on optimizing for high-performing and engaged software program groups and management.
In my conversations with senior leaders, I’ve come to grasp the need to measure productiveness. Senior leaders are below stress to ship outcomes whereas capitalizing on their investments in groups and know-how. There are not any sinister intentions behind measuring developer productiveness; leaders genuinely need their groups to be as productive as doable. The issue is that developer productiveness is extremely tough to measure, leading to organizations allocating disproportionate effort and sources whereas looking for the magic measure. This funding in measurement takes valuable time away from initiatives that would assist builders be extra productive.
Think about the chances if the identical period of time and vitality was invested in enhancing developer productiveness reasonably than making an attempt to measure it.
Reality: Comfortable builders are productive builders
Deliberately enhancing developer expertise is essentially the most potent manner to enhance developer productiveness inside a corporation.
Comfortable workers are productive workers could seem to be an apparent assertion, however this will get misplaced within the developer productiveness dialogue.
Assume again to any high-performing developer you’ve labored with; likelihood is they’ve gone above and past what was formally anticipated of them. This developer was probably extremely engaged, had every part they wanted to carry out at their finest, and usually loved their work.
The behaviors related to workers who “exceed expectations” are often called have organizational citizenship habits (OCB) and are pushed by job satisfaction. 1000’s of educational analysis papers again the notion that happy workers are productive workers — software program builders are not any exception.
So, if happy builders are productive builders, developer productiveness is a by-product of developer pleasure.
