Context Developer productivity is essential to the success of software development organizations. Team leaders use developer productivity information for managing tasks in a software project. Developer productivity metrics can be computed from software repositories data to support leaders’ decisions. We can classify these metrics in code-based metrics, which rely on the amount of produced code, and commit-based metrics, which rely on commit activity. Although metrics can assist a leader, organizations usually neglect their usage and end up sticking to the leaders’ subjective perceptions only. Objective We aim to understand whether productivity metrics can complement the leaders’ perceptions. We also aim to capture leaders’ impressions about relevance and adoption of productivity metrics in practice. Method This paper presents a multi-case empirical study performed in two organizations active for more than 18 years. Eight leaders of nine projects have ranked the developers of their teams by productivity. We quantitatively assessed the correlation of leaders’ rankings versus metric-based rankings. As a complement, we interviewed leaders for qualitatively understanding the leaders’ impressions about relevance and adoption of productivity metrics given the computed correlations. Results Our quantitative data suggest a greater correlation of the leaders’ perceptions with code-based metrics when compared to commit-based metrics. Our qualitative data reveal that leaders have positive impressions of code-based metrics and potentially would adopt them. Conclusions Data triangulation of productivity metrics and leaders’ perceptions can strengthen the organization conviction about productive developers and can reveal productive developers not yet perceived by team leaders and probably underestimated in the organization.

中文翻译：

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开发人员生产力的代码和提交指标：关于团队领导看法的研究

上下文 开发人员的生产力对于软件开发组织的成功至关重要。团队领导使用开发人员生产力信息来管理软件项目中的任务。可以从软件存储库数据计算开发人员生产力指标，以支持领导者的决策。我们可以将这些指标分为基于代码的指标（依赖于生成的代码量）和基于提交的指标（依赖于提交活动）。尽管指标可以帮助领导者，但组织通常会忽视它们的使用，最终只坚持领导者的主观看法。目标 我们旨在了解生产力指标是否可以补充领导者的看法。我们还旨在捕捉领导者对实践中生产力指标的相关性和采用的印象。方法 本文介绍了在两个活跃了 18 年以上的组织中进行的多案例实证研究。九个项目的八位领导者按生产力对他们团队的开发人员进行了排名。我们定量评估了领导者排名与基于指标的排名之间的相关性。作为补充，我们采访了领导者，以定性地了解领导者对考虑到计算出的相关性的生产力指标的相关性和采用的印象。结果我们的定量数据表明，与基于提交的指标相比，领导者的看法与基于代码的指标之间存在更大的相关性。我们的定性数据显示，领导者对基于代码的指标有积极的印象，并可能会采用它们。