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Originally published at Internet.comEveryone wants programmers to be productive. Managers of programmers want maximum productivity - it gets the work done faster and makes the managers look good. All other things being equal, programmers like being productive. They can get home earlier, reduce stress during the workday, and feel better about their finished products. Programming productivity is even in each country's national interest, since it advances the country's position in the worldwide software industry.
Unfortunately, the standard definitions of software productivity are incorrect. They miss the essence of software development. This article examines some of the usual definitions for programmer productivity, shows why they are wrong, and then proposes an alternate definition that accurately captures what programming is really about.
Lines of code per day - This is the classic definition of software productivity for individual programmers. Unfortunately, as other authors have noted as well, the definition makes little sense. Imagine a programmer named Fred Fastfinger who writes 5000 lines of code, on average, each workday. Now assume Fred's code is of such poor quality that, for each day of work he does, someone else must spend five days debugging the code. Is Fred highly productive? Certainly not. What we want is many lines of good code...
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