Terrible title but a great question. The obvious metrics are lines of codes or tasks completed. At our startup we have a Trac setup and make lots of little tickets and check them off. Maybe 2 or 3 major tickets get completed per week per developer. More than that and you are making the tasks too granular and are wasting time doing admin overhead, less than that and they aren't specific enough a la GTD.
He briefly mentions some of this; not all tickets are created equal, and neither are all lines of code. Writing thousands of lines of boilerplate code may not be as productive as fixing dozens of critical bugs without adding anything new. Similarly, hitting on a lot of relatively simple tickets may be less productive than fixing the toughest tickets.
I agree. It's also important to remember that if those tickets didn't generate revenue and if they would never generate revenue no one would really want you to spend time on them.
Most businesses seem to use software as a set of automated business rules or as a service to clients and what the owner of such companies are looking at is profit. How much money did it cost for you to write software that made $X million? Honestly I think that's the only metric people really care about.
What about maintainability and the SOLID principles? That's a matter of by spending $N million on maintenance how many millions have we saved on future cost to implement profit driving features.
If what you are doing at your company doesn't somehow lead back to profit (even something as simple as "letting the devs do this keeps the good ones here") I guarantee no one will want you to do it. If you do it and it does drive some revenue, the question will be was the cost worth the reward.
The problem most companies have is it is very difficult to relate what each task a programmer works on to each dollar of revenue earned.
I typically get 20-40 tickets done per week. I don't have your problem of granularity, because my tracker is optimized for highly granular tasks (5-10 seconds to create a task, 2 to check it off, it's almost a todo list). I find the granularity greatly helps my estimation abilities.
Yes, please. While a simple Todo system works for this sort of thing, none of the real issue tracking systems I've used have been even close to unobtrusive for small tasks. I'm very curious as well.
