McKinsey recently published an article claiming they can measure developer productivity. This has provoked something of a backlash from some prominent software people, but I have not seen anyone engage with the content of the article itself, so I thought this would be useful.
I am writing this as though the authors have approached me for a technical review of their article. You can think of it as an open letter.
The great thing about measuring developer productivity is that you can quickly identify the bad programmers. I want to tell you about the worst programmer I know, and why I fought to keep him in the team.
The goal of software delivery is to minimise the lead time to business impact. Everything else is detail.
Well, I certainly didn’t expect that kind of interest in my last post. In the past I’ve tended to have a few hundred people reading my infrequent mumblings. In the last few days nearly 20,000 people have popped by according to my site statistics, leaving nearly 150 comments. Crikey!
Software Craftsmanship risks putting the software at the centre rather than the benefit the software is supposed to deliver, mostly because we are romantics with big egos. Programming is about automating work like crunching data, processing and presenting information, or controlling and automating machines.