4.5. What Is Productivity?
This is a book about improving IT productivity, but I have not yet told you what I mean by the word. Okay, now I will. (Remember, here I am talking about developer productivity. Later, I will explain how to use the improvement in developer productivity to achieve a quantum leap in the productivity of the enterprise as a whole.)
Over time, there have been many attempts to define metrics that effectively measure software development productivity. Most of the ones that I have seen are amazingly complicated and very difficult to apply.
There is a simpler productivity metric that should be used across the industry: the total number of lines of code (LOC) in the organization divided by the number of people who work on that code. For short, I will call this metric the LOC per head (where "head" means "person" in business jargon).
Get The Next Leap in Productivity: What Top Managers Really Need to Know about Information Technology now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
