Enterprise Connection: How do you report on developer productivity using Jira Data?

[#1]

Curious to know what process / reports do you create to report on developer productivity?

On Jira Cloud ? Do you use Story points and perform a summation by group tasks which belong to an epic and plot on a column chart against Week or Months time series? I have done Jira Data ingestion into AWS Redshift and write SQL Queries via looker to perform the above grouping and got some useful metrics out.

On Jira Data Center? Do you rely on tools eazyBI or out-of-box Jira reports?

Do you rely on Time Estimate value for Jira Tasks?

[Dave Liao]

Curious what other companies and teams think of as developer productivity?

I've often seen management ask for cycle time per ticket for teams in general, especially operational teams.

What's the motivation for measuring our performance? Is it to better ourselves and our teams, or to save money? Or both?

@shyam.bhojwani - thanks for posting! 👍 It's timely, because I'm actually connecting a Jira Cloud instance into eazyBI Cloud right now. 😅

[Emre Toptancı _OBSS_]

I would recommend building small teams (less than 10 people) and focusing on team productivity rather than individual output. An individual developer producing no apparent output might be supporting others in such a way that s/he might be contributing to the overall output more than anybody else. There is no healthy way to measure this but if you work with small enough teams, the team and the team lead will know who is working and who is not.

And for team productivity, try to break your backlog items as much as possible (to the degree that it still makes sense), estimate the cost of your work in any way you like (story points, days, hours, cups, grams, etc... ), and track the throughput: How much work is getting done in a given time period.

[Turgay Çelik]

Generally, we accumulate story point completion and time completion. We were exporting data to excel and generate charts.

I have developed Aggregate Analytics, a Jira Add-on that automatically performs story point and time aggregations. The app also performs several analyses on the task groups. The first version of the app is available at the marketplace and I am actively working on adding new capabilities. I am open to feedback and feature requests, please feel free to reach out.

[elizabeth_jones]

I use the completion of committed work to measure the team. If you are using Agile Scrum, measuring the team, rather than individual developers is a best practice. 

[Dave Liao]

@Emre Toptancı _OBSS_ - team productivity over individual output is an important callout! 👍

I watched a Team '21 presentation by @Craeg Strong where he demonstrated a Kanban board showing collaborators on each card.

On cross-functional teams where action is fast and furious, team members may not always be the Assignee on a card, and seeing your name on a board reminds you that you're involved.

[Eva Kasiak]

I wish the conversation about productivity would be kept on few levels:

• single team- if it's Scrum then increment, Sprint goals, measuring value and outcome not solely the outputs
• multiple teams delivering the PI

We might have challenges such as predictabilities of the PIs, how many Story points were added and/or removed from the PI or sprint, whether we've managed to achieve the goals, how many bugs we've discovered etc.

The overall challenge I personally have is how to learn the organization to shift from the previous thinking of the due dates, predictabilities, enchanting reality with reporting we've seen in waterfall projects into focus on the outcome, value, OKRs as a driver of the strategy and roadmaps.

On top of that the educational aspects for the customers, where we shift from giving them the scope and time and we all together learn to make our releases always happening in the same time and we actively manage the roadmap, cascade it through the releases and backlog items to deliver.

I know the question was more about developers' productivity. But isn't developer productivity impacted by clarity over the releases, roadmap, and past whole team velocity? Isn't influenced by whole team capabilities to learn, to refine vertically, to make granular user stories with a strong role of a Product Owner and the management to steer the roadmap and create the strategy which is the outcome and value-oriented not feature factory and output?