Programmer productivity metrics

[BusinessAnalyst2012]

What is a good metric of productivity of programmers? I get the impression some of my dev team are slacking off and have asked the lead to send me a weekly report by developer of how many Lines Of Code each has written. However I am getting strong push back on this so I need an alternative.

What does the panel recommend. Also, what is so wrong with LOC as a metric. If I was running a potato factory I would want to know how many spuds each worker had peeled, same difference in my view.

Fecking prima donnas

[MyUserName]

Lots of lines of code does not always mean a good program. Once programmers realise you are doing this they will simply produce huge amounts of code whether it is a good idea or not.

Programmer productivity can be tricky to measure unless you have done it yourself.

A simply one character change might take a week to track down (a few weeks ago it took me 3 days to track down and work out where someone had missed out the letters 'el').
A hundred line class could be knocked up in half an hour or even a couple of minutes if copied from the web.

Do you have automated testing? Could you track bugs fixed/caused per programmer?
Do you record estimates and track progress against them?

[Bunk]

If I was running a potato factory

That sounds more your level.

[NickFitz]

I'll bite

This uses JavaScript, but any C-style language (C, Java, C#, etc.) will be the same:

function resultOfTheAddingOfTwoAndTwo() {
    var a;
    var b;
    a = 2;
    b = 2;
    var c;
    c = a + b;
    return c;
}

var r = resultOfTheAddingOfTwoAndTwo();
print(r);

is, by your metric, worth eleven times (twelve if we count the blank line) as much as:

print(2 + 2);

[speling bee]

Value of benefit realised / Cost of time worked.

[northernladuk]

What is a good metric of productivity of programmers? I get the impression some of my dev team are slacking off and have asked the lead to send me a weekly report by developer of how many Lines Of Code each has written. However I am getting strong push back on this so I need an alternative.

What does the panel recommend. Also, what is so wrong with LOC as a metric. If I was running a potato factory I would want to know how many spuds each worker had peeled, same difference in my view.

Fecking prima donnas

Kick the fukwit out that is looking after them now and get someone that can do the job in his place IMO

[AtW]

What is a good metric of productivity of programmers?

Positive ROI from their work, that's the only metric that should matter.

[speling bee]

Kick the fukwit out that is looking after them now and get someone that can do the job in his place IMO

BA skulls caved in / week?

[doodab]

MyCo measures it in pounds. The more pounds I have the more productive I have been.

Lines of code is a bad metric because a bad programmer will write thousands of lines of tulip code that doesn't work. Then a good programmmer will come in and throw 90% of it away. You'd try and charge him for the privelege.

[adubya]

I've worked somewhere where the PM (old skool) had written a tool in Visual Basic to report how many lines of code each developer had written per week.

Was quite interesting when the business requirements had changed dramatically such that the weekly delta was negative

It's a tulipe metric