BlueOptima Productivity Metrics: Common Terminology for Developer Analytics

Understanding Coding Effort (CE)

Coding Effort (CE) measures the effort delivered to make a change to different source code and configuration files. It takes into account aspects of the programmer’s environment that are not under their control, such as working in a legacy source file versus a brand new stand-alone class.

Coding Effort accurately reflects the effort invested in source code change by evaluating every change made by all developers against 36 static source code metrics as they contribute code through the software development process.

Key Characteristics of Coding Effort

No Time Tracking: Coding Effort does not involve time tracking but is expressible in hours.

Statistical Estimate: It is a statistical estimate of the time it would take an average developer in your organisation to deliver a change if purely cutting code at the keyboard.

Cognitive Demand: The maximum amount of effort delivered daily is capped at FIVE hours to account for the fact that delivering source code changes is cognitively demanding compared to non-coding activities like requirements, meetings, and documentation.

Actual Coding Effort (ACE)

Actual Coding Effort is an internally benchmarked measure of the intellectual effort being delivered by developers into source code changes. This includes:

New code

Refactoring

Code removal

Billable Coding Effort (BCE)

Billable Coding Effort (BCE) occurs when developers store up changes and commit them as one large "chunk". This change is pro-rated back across preceding working days and can be shown as a total BCE value or an average BCE per day (BCE/day).

Billable Coding Effort scores typically range between zero and five hours.

BCE/Day Proration Principles

Maximum Cap: The maximum BCE/day is FIVE hours, based on academic and enterprise time and motion studies.

Proration Limits: BCE can be pro-rated either to NINE active days or to the date of the latest commit.

Measurement Basis: The measurement is based on a developer's active days, which are not limited to working days or every calendar day.

Exceptions: The only exception occurs when commits are completed on a weekend day or public holiday.

About BlueOptima

BlueOptima provides a SaaS technology that objectively measures software development efficiency. Our core metrics for productivity and code maintainability allow executives to make data-driven decisions related to talent optimization, vendor management, location strategy, and more.

‍