For many software development teams, productivity is still often a big mystery. When is it done? What does it mean to be "done"? Is it more valuable to be "fast", or to be "efficient"? And how would you improve your "productivity" or "predictability"? This talk will give you some food for thought on how you can assess and measure productivity in your team. It also provides some tips on how to optimize for productivity: the team, the tools and the software design.

1. (Re)inventing Software Development PPrroodduuccttiivviittyy
ppeetteerr@@2222fflloowwss..nnll @@PPeetteerrHHeennddrriikkss8800

2. What is Productivity
● “Productivity is an average measure of the efficiency of
production. It can be expressed as the ratio of output to inputs
used in the production process, i.e. output per unit of input.”
● Useful for: improvement, prediction, comparison

3. Common productivity measurements
● Story points/velocity
● Function points
● Requirement
● Lines of Code
● What about value?

4. Measuring success
Time
Features
Money
Quality

5. Value perception mismatch
Project Business

6. A different way: Valve productivity example
12 people
1 garage
2 mln units sold
2500 people
Global offices
0,5 mln units sold
● No “projects”
● Developers measured
on business results
● Lot of freedom, but
also high discipline

7. Why the iron trangle used to be ok
● Building software used to be hard
● Mostly known what was needed
● Business value usually obvious

8. “Agile productivity model”

9. Tip 1: measure in business results
Go to production, during the project!
New Search Web Service
– Number of searches
– % of successful searches
– Performance, error rate
– % of total searches, including
old service
HR recruitment mobile game
– Number of visits
– Number of applications in total
– Number of applications through
game
– % of useful applications
– Game rating on store

10. Video

11. Tip 2: humans need focus
● Limit the number of items in progress
● Limit the amount of work per item
● Strive for focus in your software design
– E.g. separate concerns as security, concurrency, error handling, ui,
data storage feature logic.

12. Tip 3: let everyone develop
Classic hand-overs
Analyst/
Designer Requirement Developer
System
writes reads develops
Let others play with the system
Analyst/
Designer
Developer
System
UI layout
Business rules
Interesting technical
stuff

13. Programming is easy!*
* As you long as you avoid hard stuff like
concurrency, memory management,
large scale codebases, security etc.

14. Examples of shared development
● Analyst/designer
– UI layout, business rules
● Database expert
– Tables, queries
● Users
– Table export to Excel
– Customization of layout/color
● Developers
– Overall infrastructure
– Integration, concurrency, security, clustering, etc.
Analyst
User
Developer System
DBA

15. Some closing references / Q & A
Gabe Newell on productivity
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Td_PGkfIdIQ
Bret Victor on direct manipulation
https://vimeo.com/36579366
Anthony Ulwick:
What customers want
peter@22flows.nl @PeterHendriks80