How to Measure Tech Debt With Surveys

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Sierra: We started measuring technical debt with surveys in 2018. Sierra was involved in trying to use that as a basis for then going to objective metrics from the code base and saying like, can we see these things from that angle? Now that we have engineers telling us what kinds of where to look, can we find it in the code base? That lets us understandlike, where the big challenges are. And it also lets like product areas or teams know, hey, my engineers are saying they're bothered by technical debt. Like, what flavor is it? What can I do about it? If it's a migration or if it's like dead code or whatever, I know then what

This week we’re joined by Ciera Jaspan and Collin Green, who lead the Engineering Productivity Research team at Google. Ciera and Collin have written several papers from studies they’ve conducted, and this discussion covers the insights from their research as well as their work more broadly at Google.

Discussion points:

(1:19) About the Engineering Productivity Research team
(3:57) How the team interacts with the rest of the organization
(5:58) The different backgrounds included on the team
(13:11) How Google measures developer productivity
(18:54) Evaluating discrepancies between qualitative and quantitative data
(28:40) Google’s quarterly developer survey
(32:02) Distributing survey results back to the organization
(40:25) Misunderstandings about surveys
(43:51) Ciera and Collin’s paper on why measuring productivity is difficult
(50:35) Reductionist metrics for measuring productivity
(55:26) Examples of other fields that have struggled with measurement
(59:00) Google’s study on measuring technical debt
(1:08:05) Human judgment in measurement

Mentions and links:
Follow Ciera and Collin on LinkedIn
A Human-Centered Approach to Measuring Developer Productivity - Paper, Abi’s summary
Enabling the Study of Software Development with Cross-Tool Logs - Paper
Defining, Measuring, and Managing Tech Debt - Paper, Abi’s summary
Google’s Goals, Signals, Metrics framework - Paper, Abi’s summary