Category: metrics

Productivity

August 25, 2008 by jeremy

Productivity is often confused with velocity. They're related, but they're very different things.

Velocity is the amount of work that you/your team can do in an iteration. In economics terms, productivity is defined as "the ratio of what is produced to what is required to produce" (source: Wikipedia). So, a person who can carve ten statues out of a lump of granite is more productive than a person who can only carve eight statues out of an equal size lump of granite.

At this point it's understood that we can't measure productivity when it comes to building software because there's no good, consistent, accurate way to measure output.

However, while we can't measure our productivity, we can often improve it. Without measurement we won't know how much of an improvement we've gained (or how much we've regressed), but we can measure improvements in velocity, which can indicate corresponding productivity improvements.