Samuli Heljo | How to measure team productivity?

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How to measure team productivity?

published May 26, 2010

Imagine this. Team A is producing 500 lines of php code per sprint whereas team B is producing 400 lines of Java code per sprint. Sprint length for the team A is 3 weeks, team B is doing two week sprints. In the team A there are 5 developers and one tester, team B consists of 4 developers. Both teams are “scrum mastered” by same person. Which one of these teams is more productive?

I have given lots of thoughts to team productivity and to systems and processes that could reliably measure it. Today, I finished reading Leading Lean Software Development and found a very nice gem from it on the page 235, where authors discuss about productivity.

First they state that there is no good definition for software productivity. Software development is rarely the goal of a system but a way to solve a customer’s problem. Therefore, measurement of function points and lines of code is irrelevant and the real productivity should be measured from value provided to the customer.

This is very powerful stuff as I have many times witnessed how a project is measured against a-year-old-and-out-of-date project plan which is pretty crazy. What is the value we are providing to a customer? How much value are we providing per developer? These are the questions we should be asking.

So, was team A or B more productive?

Samuli @ 21:16 (No Comments)

tags: Customer, Lean, Productivity