The Next Leap in Productivity: What Top Managers Really Need to Know about Information Technology
by Adam Kolawa
4.5. What Is Productivity?
This is a book about improving IT productivity, but I have not yet told you what I mean by the word. Okay, now I will. (Remember, here I am talking about developer productivity. Later, I will explain how to use the improvement in developer productivity to achieve a quantum leap in the productivity of the enterprise as a whole.)
Over time, there have been many attempts to define metrics that effectively measure software development productivity. Most of the ones that I have seen are amazingly complicated and very difficult to apply.
There is a simpler productivity metric that should be used across the industry: the total number of lines of code (LOC) in the organization divided by the number of people who work on that code. For short, I will call this metric the LOC per head (where "head" means "person" in business jargon).
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