Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Productivity

A good way to magnify productivity differences between software developers is to have them work on the same set of files. Slower developers will have to continually merge changes made by faster developers until being able to commit their changes (without breaking any tests, assuming there are tests that go beyond successfully compiling and linking and a policy that requires to have tests pass before committing changes). Ultimately, their tasks will have to be reassigned to faster developers, or they will never be completed.