When measuring developer performance, it’s hard to find an appropriate metric to use that doesn’t rely too heavily on anecdotal evidence. That’s why we at Bowery were excited by Rebel Labs’ Developer Productivity study, a 40-page report on what tools and practices developers employ in their daily life. In order to provide a report that gets at the gist of what “performance” really entails, Rebel Labs weighed the effect of different practices and tools on both the quality of the software and the predictability of its release.

Here are some of the practices the study measured:

Taking care of technical debt

Monitoring and fixing code quality issues

Automated Testing

Pairing up

Reviewing Code

Implementing all of the above practices would yield some increase in software quality, but at what monetary and time cost? That’s where the measurement of predictability comes into play. By measuring these practices against the likelihood of software being released as scheduled, we have a fairly solid metric for viewing whether the time spent improving quality helps developers meet deadlines.