Thoughts on measuring productivity

Now that we need to raise the bar, how do we do it? We really need to show some improvement in our process and pass the benefits back to the customer. This thing was there for sometime in my mind on how we actually measure the productivity of the project team and then benchmark it and try to improve further upon that. Now I need to qualify that my project teams consists of development and testing teams. We know that there are some metrics like test case executed per hour which can be used as a testing team productivity metric. Agree though that all of them are not without bias. For instance, some test cases may be very simple and straight forward to test which means more of similar types can be executed in a period of time while some may be pretty complicated ones, requiring specific scenarios to be created and data to be available to test, which in turn will take longer time to set-up and test. But when we are talking about a testing team’s productivity, we can assume that there will be both types of cases and finally at the end of the project we come up with an average test execution productivity figure. Comparing the same across various projects tested over a period of time will give us a fair indication of how the testing team is performing. With a defect tracking and time tracking mechanism that we have in place, we are now able to pull out these figures from those systems and are now working on the benchmarking part for testing teams.

But now the difficult part that I have been grappling with. How do we measure the development team’s productivity? One measure of this may be LOC. But this is not a unbiased one and in maintenance and enhancement type of projects, this actually doesnot mean much, coz most of the development time is spent in analyzing and modifying the existing code, rather than creating new programs. Also, the defect fixing turnaround time can be a measure, but this will be only for the SIT support phase. I am still to figure out some productivity metric for developers for the Analysis phase, Design Phase and Coding phase.