Productivity in Software Engineering: Beyond lines of code, the importance of experience in the development cycle
In any industry, measuring productivity is essential for identifying areas that need improvement and implementing effective changes.
When discussing software development, some still say that the number of lines of code written or how many commits you did in one day is an adequate measure of productivity.
It is still expected that the productivity of a team or a software engineer will be associated with the number of lines of code. This is a simplistic and potentially harmful idea for a team's software quality, dynamics, and culture. Software development is a creative and complex process that involves much more than just typing code. Efficient solutions often require fewer lines of code, while long codes can be confusing and ineffective. Code quality, ease of maintenance, efficiency, and functionality are much more meaningful metrics. At VTEX, we believe that instead of demanding productivity, we choose to understand how to make people more productive.
At VTEX, we understand that a lousy development experience impacts productivity. Therefore, we saw the need to create a group dedicated to supporting our product engineering teams; we needed a way to measure and improve the satisfaction of our software engineers regarding the processes and tools they used to develop systems. This led us to first look for a solution to this experience problem and then measure and refine productivity if necessary. It is important to highlight that our People Operations also monitors the qualitative experience of all VTEX employees. We work together to cross-reference information from the two qualitative analyses and enrich our understanding of the development experience at VTEX.
