Rethinking Productivity in Software Engineering

© The Author(s) 2019

C. Sadowski, T. Zimmermann (eds.)Rethinking Productivity in Software Engineeringhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-4221-6_2

2. No Single Metric Captures Productivity

Ciera Jaspan¹  and Caitlin Sadowski¹

(1)

Google, Mountain View, California, USA

 

“Measuring software productivity by lines of code is like measuring progress on an airplane by how much it weighs.”

—Bill Gates

“The purpose of software engineering is to control complexity, not to create it.”

—Pamela Zave

The urge to measure the productivity of developers is not new. Since it is often the case at organizations that more code needs to be written, many attempts have been made to measure productivity based on lines of code (LOC). For example, in early 1982, the engineering ...