“What gets measured, gets managed.” This famous quote from Peter Drucker highlights the importance of measuring performance in order to achieve optimal business outcomes.

While businesses and companies constantly try their best to measure productivity, it is a tough task in the software development realm. Though most teams measure code activity - like what you see on Github (number of lines written/deleted by individual developers, number of commits, pull requests for code reviews), it does not take into account the quality of the code.

A more comprehensive way to measure a developer’s productivity would be to look at measuring the work completed, and the quality and importance of the work.

Here, we suggest 5 things to track to measure a developers’ productivity, so hop on in!

To Measure Amount of Work Output

1) Time Spent on Tasks

The easiest way to measure productivity from an employee is their ability to meet realistic deadlines. While not fully accurate (we all can spend time but not be productive), it does serve as a guide to productivity.

If a developer is consistently unable to meet realistic deadlines, it serves as a flag for businesses to delve further to understand the reasons - whether there are emotional or personal issues, or aptitude problems.

One way of measuring time spent on tasks is the use of tickets. Software like ,,Jira can help track the task progress for developers.

2) Deploys, Commits, Pull Requests

Deploys and commits is another way to measure the activity of a developer through time. A sample shot on Github:

To Measure Quality of Work Output

3) Bug Rates

The quality of a developer’s work can be measured through the number of bugs that arises when running the code. By measuring the impact of the bugs and the number of bugs, or running quality tests, teams are able to get a clear picture on the code quality.

4) Code Reviews

Code reviews are a great way to assess a coder’s performance and productivity. Nobody wants unmaintainable code that is hard to understand and messy even though it is working.

If you need a basic template to follow, here’s a suggestion:

5) Code Screening Software

You can also use code review software to screen code quality in terms of application security, code cleanliness, and vulnerabilities to ensure that the code is scalable.