Businesses establish specific development standards for application modernization to evaluate the software developer’s performance in a given timeframe. Organizations use these standards to evaluate developer productivity. These metrics assist businesses in identifying ineffective workflows, tools or resources, and behavioral attributes that have an impact on developer productivity in a development space.
In this article, we will go through the methods, tips, and metrics to measure developer productivity. Moreover, we will discover a couple of ways to improve software developers’ productivity during the product development lifecycle.
Key Insights
- Using the right metrics can reduce technical debt and scope creep while also keeping developer workload manageable.
- You can use DORA and SPACE to measure the productivity of your development lifecycle.
- Healthy metrics, which measure outcomes, are often preferable to vanity metrics, which merely measure work performed.
- Visual LANSA, a professional low-code development platform, improves productivity and makes it easier to produce healthy metrics.
What Is Developer Productivity?
Developer productivity refers to a developer’s ability to develop high-quality software solutions that operate as planned and are simple to maintain in a reasonable timeframe. In simple words, developer productivity is the measure of a developer’s performance that represents how productive a software developer is in any given matrix or time frame.
Why Is Measuring Developer Productivity Challenging?
Measuring developer productivity can be challenging because the impact of physical lines of code isn’t always proportional to the number of lines written. Also, pain points may arise during the development process, which can decrease productivity. With this in mind, instead of looking for the next big idea to increase productivity, it’s important to learn about these and other critical challenges. Here’s a bit more detail:
More Code Doesn’t Equal More Progress
Logical lines of code, where several actions can take place on a single line, differ from physical lines of code. Although adding extra comment lines is intended to make code easier to maintain, doing so will have the opposite effect. Parsimony and clarity frequently have trade-offs that are challenging to quantify with such a fundamental metric.
Customer Pain Points Impact Development Mid-stream
Some potential customer pain points may come up during the dev process — even while you’re measuring the developer’s productivity. These may include:
- Rapidly changing conditions
- Low developer productivity
- Lack of talent
- Difficult innovation processes
- Difficult integrations
- Modern usage limitations
- Finding ways to reduce high maintenance costs
- The need to scale to meet growing business needs
Prioritizing the Wrong Metrics
It’s easy to end up focusing on the wrong metrics, which can have a ripple effect on your incentivization as well. For example, rewarding developers for the number of hours worked while coding may encourage more work but may not result in more completed features of an app. Or merely rewarding programmers for the number of features they produce may not result in dependable, bug-free, effective code.
Measurement Paralysis
Measurement paralysis is when leaders get overwhelmed by the complexity of trying to measure developer productivity. This leads to frustration, and some may stop measuring it altogether. This could be because the perceived results of the measurement process may not feel like they’re worth the time and effort. Or, in some cases, leaders may fear measuring the wrong thing and don’t want to unnecessarily burden the dev team.
Benefits of Measuring Developer Productivity
When your measurement process helps developers produce high-quality programming in a reasonable amount of time, they flourish — both as creators and team members. They feel more eager to dive into creative projects and often produce more innovations as a result. At the same time, your business can set and reach more ambitious goals and grow faster as a result. It also aids organizations in building a software development estimation system, which plays a key role in the budget-building process.
Improves Business Performance
A business thrives when its developers are building innovations that benefit its bottom line. Developer productivity, therefore, has a direct impact on business performance. When you encourage productive, effective development practices, you also avoid the kind of laborious, slow development that can bring your innovative processes to a halt.
Delivers High-quality Software
Highly productive developers to produce better quality software. On the other hand, when productivity drops, it’s easy for more bugs and technical issues to creep into the end product. Even though you can catch many of these during the testing phase, they often end up reducing the quality of the software your end users get.
Reduces the Chances of Burnout
As you explore different ways how to measure developer productivity – and why to do so — reducing burnout may be at the top of your list. When your dev team finds themselves inundated with tedious tasks, they may get frustrated. On the other hand, when you choose to measure productivity using metrics they know exactly how to achieve, you reduce frustration and constantly reiterate the value of the programming they’re building.
Key Metrics for Measuring Developer Productivity
At the heart of all developer productivity tools lie the metrics needed to quantify the progress of your team members. Without metrics, leaders may fall into the trap of assessing progress based on whether a task is “done or not.” But by honing in on specific elements of the dev process, you can scaffold your evaluation system. This makes it easier for leaders to assess software developer productivity and for programmers to understand how they can improve.
DORA & SPACE Frameworks for Measuring Developer Productivity
DORA, which stands for DevOps Research and Assessment, consists of four primary metrics:
- Frequency of development
- The amount of lead time it takes to produce code
- The mean time to recovery (MTTR), which is the mean time it takes to recover from an incident or failure
- Change failure rate, which is the percentage of deployments that result in failures.
DORA can be effective when used properly, but it also has its flaws due to the limitations of each metric. For instance, frequency of development doesn’t take into consideration the quality of the end product. The same can be said when assessing based on the amount of lead time it takes to produce code.
SPACE is also an acronym, and it stands for:
- Satisfaction and well-being of the developers
- Performance of the product
- Activity, such as deployments and code commits
- Communication and collaboration between team members
- Efficiency and flow of the work process
SPACE is one of the more effective developer productivity metrics because it can measure how well a team is working together to produce high-performing software. At the same time, like DORA, it has limitations.
For example, to truly use SPACE effectively, you may have to take an extra step: You may need to grade each of the non-qualitative metrics using a performance-based coefficient. For instance, suppose the app only performed 6 out of 10 functions well even though the team scored high in the “C” (communication and collaboration) metric. It may make sense to qualify — or even reduce — the “C” score by a factor of 0.6. Otherwise, you risk ignoring the importance of performance in your productivity assessment process.
Regardless of the metrics you use, it’s important to use them thoughtfully and to factor in input from your dev team.
Healthy Metrics vs Vanity Metrics
Healthy metrics tend to refer to qualitative metrics, which measure the quality of performance, while vanity metrics typically refer to quantitative measurements, which measure the amount of work done. Here are some examples:
Healthy metrics
- Lead time it takes to implement effective changes
- Cycle time, or the amount of time it takes to produce effective code as part of a project
- Maintainable code created, which refers to the amount of code the team creates that’s easy to understand and change over time
Vanity metrics
- Number of code commits, which is the number of times the team produces code that they save to a repository
- Hours worked on a phase of a project
- The number of lines of code created
Tips to Improve Developer Productivity
You can improve developer productivity in several ways:
Specify the project specifications
Clearly define the project’s specifications. Moreover, it enables you to start working on the project immediately. Properly defined requirements can also help to ensure that test results are functional and effective. Properly defined requirements can also help to ensure that test results are functional and effective.
Optimize your Integrated Development Environment (IDE)
Several IDEs have autocomplete, syntax highlighting, and real-time code analysis tools. By using IDEs with these kinds of features lets you speed up the development process, primarily because you save developers time. For example, each time the IDE autocompletes a coding phrase, the programmer saves a few seconds. Over hundreds of lines of code, these add up to significant time savings.
Eliminate unneeded or extra tests
Developers in today’s agile teams are responsible for testing. This may result in them frequently spending large amounts of their time on maintenance-related tasks. Reviewing and enhancing this maintenance work is an important step toward improving developer productivity.
One way to do this is to automate the code review process. You can use an automated system to assign code reviews to different people according to the code’s function. In that way, you send batches of code to those who are most likely to spot an issue with its function.
Minimize distractions and multitasking
Constant deadline alerts, open workspaces, and limited attention spans are all factors that may reduce the developer’s productivity. Likewise, when you work on multiple projects at once, it ends up taking a long time to complete all the to-do lists on time. Therefore, you should avoid attempts at multitasking.
In the IBM i space, LANSA offers a set of powerful tools that can boost productivity. This includes Visual LANSA, a low-code development platform that uses a visual, drag-and-drop interface to speed up the dev process. With Visual LANSA, even those without deep technical knowledge can build effective solutions quickly because they do not have to type in much manually — if any — code.
Experienced developers benefit from pre-built, thoroughly tested code they can combine to produce even very complex software. Instead of forcing developers to rely on a manual coding solution, you can give them Visual LANSA, and they can modernize IBM i apps and create powerful integrations in far less time.
Balancing Productivity with Developer Well-being
As you encourage your development team to improve its productivity, you can’t forget their well-being. Developers have stressful jobs, and it can be easy for them to let distractions and anxiety cloud their judgment, burn them out, or reduce the quality of their work.
With this in mind, it’s important to conduct regular check-ins, asking your developers:
- How they’re doing stress-wise
- Whether they’re achieving a healthy work/life balance
- If they feel personally satisfied with the quality of the product they are producing
- How they’re doing when it comes to eating well and getting enough sleep
- Whether they’re able to unplug after work or if they constantly think about code, perhaps dreaming about it or even waking up at odd hours of the night to build an idea
Use Visual LANSA to Improve Developer Productivity
By measuring developer productivity, you give your teams concrete goals they can use to build more effective solutions faster. You simultaneously boost their on-the-job satisfaction by taking into account their well-being and satisfaction with the development process.
In the end, a thoughtful development system also produces higher-quality end products that both your organization and your dev team can be proud of.
Visual LANSA, one of the first low-code business solutions, has a powerful, user-friendly IDE. Furthermore, it combines the benefits and ideas of low-code principles with the flexibility and also control of traditional programming.
Developers can build inside the IDE using Visual LANSA to develop a solution for intricate, complex processes and special integrations. Your developers can get started quickly building corporate applications with less code — without having to learn several complicated coding languages.
Are you ready to boost your developer productivity using LANSA tools? Contact us. You can also try out Visual LANSA for free.
