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The ‘flawed five’ engineering productivity metrics

Which commonly-used metrics aren't working and why?
March 30, 2021

Which commonly-used metrics aren’t working and why?

When I began researching engineering metrics several years ago, one of the first metrics I looked into were commits. While working in GitHub, they provided graphs showing commit counts so it was easy to track. I knew it wasn’t going to be the perfect metric, but it felt useful. For starters, if an engineer had no commits it would definitely be a red flag. If there are no commits, no code is getting shipped; on a software team, that’s a problem. 

graphs showing commit counts

See how useful this metric is already? It gives you an awesome way to see how much work is getting done.

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