What Is the Best Measure of Software Development Productivity?
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. I think there is a simpler productivity metric which should be used across the industry: the total number lines of code in the organization divided by the number of people who are working on that code (including QA as well as development). For short, I will call this metric the LOC per head. I propose that this measurement is an excellent representation of the development organization’s true productivity. If the number rises, it means that the development organization is more productive. If it decreases, it means that the organization is less productive Approximately 10-20 thousand lines of code per developer is the norm for most of today’s development organizations. This is based on the current industry averages which state that a typical program has about half a million lines of
