Sports have a lot of numbers to gauge how good a player is. In baseball, there are batting average, ERA, etc. I had been wondering about software developer metrics. We can judge how good a developer is by reviewing his code, but that is very subjective. I’d like to have metrics that show how a good developer brings values to the company.
When I got my second management position, I got my chance to try to develop and implement the metric. Luckily, I also go have a great project manager to work with. He helped collect and report the numbers.
Here are the metrics:
Net Daily Burn: This is the typical velocity in Agile per developer/working days. In a typical iteration, NDB is burned/days in an iteration. However, people can get sick or take vacation. We changed it working days. So this metric tells me how much work the developer can burn per working day.
A higher ADB tells me the developer is good. It could be that the developer works hard(long hours) or is very smart and efficient. For example, if the task is to time how long all data access methods take, instead of writing system.out.println in every data access method, he/she uses AOP.
Average Daily Burn: This is ADB + other dev tasks that are not considered when the estimates were made. Our typical ‘other dev tasks’ are extra time to deal with build issues, unit testing, etc.
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