The Case Against Metrics for Developer Productivity

Dashboards, metrics frameworks, acronyms, scorecards, tools — in the rush to quantify and optimize every aspect of software development, our industry forgot that metrics were never supposed to measure productivity at all.

DORA metrics are not about individual performance or a tool for comparing teams. The website for DORA — Google’s DevOps Research and Assessment team — still reminds us that these four metrics — deployment frequency, lead time for changes, mean time to restore and change failure rate — are not productivity metrics….