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Re: (OT) Proving Productivity?

by Aristotle (Chancellor)
on Aug 05, 2003 at 16:23 UTC ( [id://281059]=note: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??


in reply to (OT) Proving Productivity?

Given the expressiveness of Perl, I think 150 lines of code per day is at least decent. I've never tried to estimate my own productivity (which is difficult anyway when your project is 85% research work), but I know 100 lines of code is a fair amount of work.

Your key problem is changing requirements. There's really no way estimating your net productivity by looking at the code when the relation between code written and completion percentage gets skewed that way. I think your best bet for that situation is to work with the extreme programming concept of user stories, where a user story is immutable once put down. Any change to it is counted as a new user story, and of course discarded requirements do not result in discarding their count of completed user stories from the total work done.

So if a change of requirements obsoletes two completed user stories, requires changes to another two completed ones, and adds three new stories, this change has incurred a cost of seven user stories. If another change affects a dozen completed user stories and adds a few new ones, you have maybe 15 new user stories. Now if you start piling those up, the client will hopefully start to understand that their "little changes" are actually causing a serious amount of work..

Makeshifts last the longest.

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Re2: (OT) Proving Productivity?
by dragonchild (Archbishop) on Aug 05, 2003 at 16:34 UTC
    Really? I know that if I start counting lines of code, I go something like this:
    Monday - 450
    Tuesday - 3
    Wednesday - 275
    Thursday - 0
    Friday - 0

    Does this mean I'm only productive on Mondays and Wednesdays? Or, did it mean that I was more productive on the other days cause I was thinking and designing and working on install procedures and user interfaces and the like, none of which involves actual code.

    My opinion is that if you spend more than 20% of your time coding, you are being less productive than you could be, especially in Perl, where 90% of every Perl application has already been written.

    ------
    We are the carpenters and bricklayers of the Information Age.

    The idea is a little like C++ templates, except not quite so brain-meltingly complicated. -- TheDamian, Exegesis 6

    Please remember that I'm crufty and crochety. All opinions are purely mine and all code is untested, unless otherwise specified.

      Ovid was talking about averages. Your example happens to average to roughly 110 LOC/day..

      Not to mention you missed my point, which should have been easily obvious from how much attention I devoted to trying to measure productivity by user stories..

      Makeshifts last the longest.

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