Almost since the arrival of the technology industry, we’ve been hunting for the White Whale, the metrics of developers’ labor. Perhaps the very desire to count KPI programmers was born out of a phrase common in traditional business: “You cannot plan if you cannot measure.”

Following the hundreds of different KPIs that the programmers were trying to get around, a lot of different methods for analyzing operational data appeared – from tracking the direction of the look at the monitor to Scrum and Kanban. Measurements of labor quality have worked so well in many industries that it seemed logical to transfer this experience to software development. The result was discouraging.

Almost since the arrival of the technology industry, we’ve been hunting for the White Whale, the metrics of developers’ labor. Perhaps the very desire to count KPI programmers was born out of a phrase common in traditional business: “You cannot plan if you cannot measure.”
Following the hundreds of different KPIs that the programmers were trying to get around, a lot of different methods for analyzing operational data appeared – from tracking the direction of the look at the monitor to Scrum and Kanban. Measurements of labor quality have worked so well in many industries that it seemed logical to transfer this experience to software development. The result was discouraging. […]