What Predicts Software Developers’ Productivity?

This resource first appeared in issue #33 on 17 Jul 2020 and has tags Technical Leadership: Software Development, Managing A Team: Other

What Predicts Software Developers’ Productivity? - Murphy-Hill, Jaspan, Sadowski, Shepherd, Phillips, Winter, Dolan. Smith & Jorden Transactions on Software Engineering (2019)

Interesting paper I just came across:

we designed a survey that asked 622 developers across 3 companies about these productivity factors and about self-rated productivity. Our results suggest that the factors that most strongly correlate with self-rated productivity were non-technical factors, such as job enthusiasm, peer support for new ideas, and receiving useful feedback about job performance. Compared to other knowledge workers, our results also suggest that software developers’ self-rated productivity is more strongly related to task variety and ability to work remotely.

There’s definitely issues with self-rated productivity, but given the problems with external measures, I’m not sure what the alternative is.

Note that the developers themselves think they’re more productive when they’re getting useful feedback about performance. It’s uncomfortable giving feedback sometimes but people want (and deserve) feedback.