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WIP: Short Article: The Myth of Developer Productivity #1484

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WIP: Short Article: The Myth of Developer Productivity #1484

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Description

EB Member: @markcmiller86 ?

Resolves #1341

NOTE: This is a WIP draft PR to develop this content collaboratively. Once we are ready for a final review and testing, we will remove the "WIP:" prefix and "draft" status.

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@bartlettroscoe bartlettroscoe added the content: article-deprecated A label for article content. This was deprecated in Feb 2024 after we established blog tracks. label Nov 3, 2022
markcmiller86
markcmiller86 reviewed Nov 3, 2022
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I've just added a few comments. Not sure where you want to take it but maybe they are helpful.

Articles/ShortArticles/MythOfDeveloperProductivity.md

* Why we care to measure productivity? => Software estimation, individual developer performance evaluation?

* The number one way of improving productivity is to write less software (see [impl-lean-dev]).
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Hmm...carried to its extremes, this would mean we wouldn't write a single line of code and we'd be infinitely productive.

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This would go along with software reuse.

Articles/ShortArticles/MythOfDeveloperProductivity.md
* The on-going cost of software maintenance is strongly correlated with the size of the code base (see: code complete???).

* Defining productivity by directly measuring the amount of software created disincentivizes solutions that may reuse existing software or refactorings that may actaully result in less overall source code.

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Developers who remove code (or have a net negative contribution on GitHub) yet maintain or even enhance functionality should be celebrated. Are they?

We don't have good processes for removing obsoleted code. All of our processes are about adding and supporting code.

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I personally feel great when I am able to delete a bunch of code that I wrote years ago and can maintain needed functionality. Every line of code deleted is one less line of code to test and maintain.

For example, making a code build faster and have its test suite run faster does not directly improve functionality but can greatly improve future development productivity. (E.g. a single Trilinos PR build takes over 6 wall-clock hours to run, and that is once it has started running. It can take days to get the PR tester to start running the builds.)

Articles/ShortArticles/MythOfDeveloperProductivity.md

Key points to make?

* Why we care to measure productivity? => Software estimation, individual developer performance evaluation?
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Always be improving processes is another reason to care. If we don't know how much something costs, we can't begin to identify where we could reduce cost (e.g. improve productivity).

What about how we (in the HPC/CSE space anyways) don't really seem to be charged with just writing code or just designing or just testing or just product development or just support. All of us wear all of these hats and frequently context switch them multiple times in any given day making the problem of measuring cost of any one that much harder.

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Again, we can measure things that we know are associated with waste and work to eliminate those things. And context switching and relearning is a major form of waste.

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I am very sorry @bartlettroscoe I am apparently supposed to be shepharding this and its wholly fallen off my radar. My sincere apologies.

I think we have a good conversation in the PR here but I think the article is completed, correct?

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Ah, ok, I see now its still in development and consists now mainly of notes to self about what to include.

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Ah, ok, I see now its still in development and consists now mainly of notes to self about what to include.

Correct

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rinkug commented May 30, 2024 •
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@bartlettroscoe : Is this active? Else consider moving it out of in-progress? Maybe draft PR?

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@bartlettroscoe : Is this active? Else consider moving it out of in-progress? Maybe draft PR?

Yes. At the last bssw.io EB meeting, @markcmiller86 and I discussed collaborating on a original/blog article on this topic next month.

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The myth of developer productivity
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