Why Measuring Productivity by Lines of Code is not a Beneficial Idea

It is difficult to measure programmer productivity; just ask anyone who has had to do it. When it comes to software programming, you know who are the stars in your team; whom you can depend on and who is struggling with it. You also know which teams are efficient and which ones are barely meeting the mark.

There will always be some ingenious coders who will try to fool you. For example, instead of just writing a better code, a programmer may write more codes or commit more time to solving bugs (or anything you use to measure productivity). Incidentally, fixing bugs later will cost more time and money than testing for bugs during software development.

The programmer may be aware that the problem can be solved with 10 lines of code, but he may write 500 lines of it just because you measure productivity by the lines of code written by him.

The best programmers try to get the work done with as little coding as possible. It does not mean that you can’t measure your programmers’ productivity at all. Counting the total time a programmer takes to write a part of the software is one way to measure productivity. You can also measure productivity by counting the turnaround time and quality of the codes.