Sally Kohn: I've often recommended to people that, you know, they think twice about some of the turnkey, SAS, metric solutions. She says these quantitative metrics can't capture the full picture of developer productivity and experience. Kohn: Let me talk about the difference between qualitative and quantitative metrics from an engineering practices standpoint. How do you incorporate the human side into your code quality measurements? And then I want to ask you to share that experience you had at Google around code quality metrics.
Max Kanat-Alexander, the Tech Lead for the Developer Productivity and Insights Team at LinkedIn, shares an inside look at LinkedIn’s metrics platform and how teams across the organization use it.
Discussion points:
- (1:31) Why Max shares how his team is measuring productivity
- (3:20) Why some teams use metrics and some don’t
- (6:03) The types of metrics Max’s team focuses on
- (12:59) The role of TPMs
- (17:05) How Max would measure productivity if he weren’t at LinkedIn
- (25:04) Surprises in how teams are using metrics at LinkedIn
- (31:27) The tooling required to enable metrics for teams to use
- (36:41) Qualitative versus quantitative metrics
- (40:39) Measuring code quality at Google
- (46:16) Whether a centralized team should own measurement
Mentions and links:
Connect with Max on LinkedIn or Twitter
Read the article, Measuring Developer Productivity and Happiness at LinkedIn
Listen to the first interview with Max and his colleague Or Michael Berlowitz: Episode 23
Abi’s blog post on the Three-Bucket Framework for Engineering Metrics