Metric for BPEL developer productivity

Image credit: thinktheology.org

TLDR

I have got very interesting task. My friend asked me to help him to determine metric that will be used to measure developers productivity in his department. What make this task more interesting is that developers are using rather new tool in their daily work: Oracle BPEL process manager.

This task is hard, because “old school” developer productivity metrics, such as number of classes, number of lines or number of test classes could not be used. Of course, from BBST foundations lecture about metrics, I knew that those metrics are wrong.

As BPEL process manager was new to me, I asked one developer to allow me to sit next to him while he was using that tool. I learned what is output of that tool. It was not code but sheet with elements that describe business process. And that was it!

We agreed that metric that will be used for measuring developer productivity is the area (measured in cm2) of sheet that represents business process created by developer.

I am very proud of this metric. Management accepted it with great enthusiasm. Fact that this metric will be used for the first time to measure developer productivity also helped a lot to sell the idea to the management. Next week we will present this metric to developers. I am very excited to present them an idea that will make them part of the history in software development.