Code Quality: how to measure developers performance?

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The fundamental problem that I have with this type of rating system is that you end up with your team in competition with each other, rather than cooperating with one another. What would be the incentive to work on hard parts of the code if you knew that you might pay a penalty? Just pick the easier things that are less prone to errors. Why help your colleague improve their code when doing so benefits them and potentially harms you with respect to the rating system.

I think you are better off using peer pressure to increase code quality: no one wants to write crap and no one wants to be known for writing crap. Make a real effort to drive defects down with TDD -- or at the very least with unit testing. Move to continuous integration and publicize who breaks the build. Make it the responsibility of the person breaking the build to fix it before they can create any new code. Things like this will drive quality up.

Once everyone is on board with the quality goals, rate the team, not the individuals. Make it a real benefit to work cooperatively. If you have slackers who are taking advantage of the team -- and everyone will know who they are -- work with them to improve and if they don't or can't, cut your losses and find someone who fits better with the team. If you have the right people, it probably will never get to this point. If they're the wrong people, both you and they are better off knowing it and moving on to a better fit.

If someone on the team really goes above and beyond, reward them with something extra, but make sure it really was an extraordinary effort beyond the rest of the team. If that's the case, the team won't mind (too much) because they'll know that their shared reward was in large part due to that person's effort.

Obviously, all of the above should be taken as general rules. Although they like to call it management science, it's really more of an art. Understanding your team's dynamics is complicated business, but I think the general rule ought to be to encourage and reward teamwork.


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Trying to measure programmers performance with bug reports is a bad idea. However, so is trying to measure performance with virtually any other metric. No matter what you do, people will figure out how to game it and give you what you're measuring without giving you what you really want.

From one of Joel's other articles:

Robert Austin, in his book Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations, says there are two phases when you introduce new performance metrics. At first, you actually get what you wanted, because nobody has figured out how to cheat. In the second phase, you actually get something worse, as everyone figures out the trick to maximizing the thing that you’re measuring, even at the cost of ruining the company.