There’s an unhealthy obsession with corporations on the lookout for a option to measure developer productiveness.
Over the past 20 years, I’ve led multidisciplinary expertise groups throughout a few of Australia’s largest enterprises. Most not too long ago, I led the event of an inner improvement platform, supporting the expertise of over 7,000 engineers as an govt supervisor on the Commonwealth Financial institution of Australia. In the present day, I lead the DevOps Evangelism workforce at Atlassian, the place I often meet with Fortune 500 corporations, touring the world sharing insights and steerage on optimizing for high-performing and engaged software program groups and management.
In my conversations with senior leaders, I’ve come to know the will to measure productiveness. Senior leaders are beneath strain to ship outcomes whereas capitalizing on their investments in groups and expertise. There aren’t 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 assets 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 probabilities if the identical period of time and power was invested in bettering developer productiveness relatively than attempting to measure it.
Truth: Completely satisfied builders are productive builders
Deliberately bettering developer expertise is probably the most potent manner to enhance developer productiveness inside a corporation.
Completely satisfied staff are productive staff might look like 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 seemingly extremely engaged, had every thing they wanted to carry out at their greatest, and customarily loved their work.
The behaviors related to staff who “exceed expectations” are often known as have organizational citizenship conduct (OCB) and are pushed by job satisfaction. 1000’s of educational analysis papers again the notion that happy staff are productive staff — software program builders aren’t any exception.
So, if happy builders are productive builders, developer productiveness is a by-product of developer pleasure.
