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cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen") wrote:
I long ago became skeptical of my peer's self-reports (and my own) of how a new technology made them "more productive" as I watched them become excited about the next shiny new tech thing. Something new would come along and make them *feel* like they were more productive (and often they would push the whole team to adopt whatever it was they were excited by), but by any measure that I could come up with, their work had not measurably improved.
(I obviously can't run rigorous experiments, but there are things you can check via source code control and bug trackers and other available metrics.)
There are things that have helped with quality over the years. Source code control (even the ones before DVCS were better than nothing), static analysis, unit tests, documentation, training. And by helping with quality, we get an indirect boost to productivity because we spend less time tracking down bugs and putting out fires in production that could've been caught earlier.