App Dev Managers Should Measure Team Productivity

Application development managers need to know how productive their teams are. Managers acknowledge that measuring their shop's productivity would enable them to make informed decisions around capacity planning, staff allocation, outsourcing, and right-sizing the shop's headcount. And yet many teams struggle to start or sustain a productivity measurement initiative, even when they are under pressure to deliver more without adding staff. Finding a workable metric continues to be the biggest challenge — counting lines of code has failed; function point analysis is imperfect and expensive, though successful for many; and devising alternatives is tricky and sometimes unconvincing. Despite these barriers, some organizations do succeed — the rest must either get started or reignite failed efforts.