Lately I’ve been asking a lot of questions that all seem to circle around, “how do I become a better software engineer?” The Pragmatic Programmer offers its own answer to that question – becoming pragmatic.
. . . if you’re a Pragmatic Programmer, you’ll share many of the following characteristics: Early adopter/fast adapter . . . When given something new, you can grasp it quickly and integrate it with the rest of your knowledge; Inquisitive . . .; Critical thinker . . .; Realistic . . . [which] gives you a good feel for how difficult things are, and how long things will take . . .; Jack of all trades . . . Although your current job may require you to be a specialist, you will always be able to move on to new areas and new challenges.
Those are five of the seven characteristics. The remaining two are “basic enough to state as tips”: “Care About Your Craft” and “Think! About Your Work.” I can see the value of each characteristic in engineering work and the engineers I look up to exhibit most, if not all, of them.
The Pragmatic Programmer offers a series of tips, some philosophical and deep, others straightforward and practical, intended to grow “more effective and more productive programmers.” But what does that really mean? How can I know if, by the end of reading this book, I am more effective and productive? Or, perhaps just as importantly, if I feel more effective and productive?
The book promises that “. . . if you follow our approach, you’ll gain experience rapidly, your productivity will increase, and you’ll have a better understanding of the entire development process. And you’ll write better software,” which does sound more effective and productive. But I’m still left with the question — how will I know?
Measuring developer productivity is a notoriously difficult task, but purely for the sake of my own curiosity and personal development, I’ve developed a little metric.
Over the next 6 months, how do the following things change?
- Cycle time of tickets.
- Self-inflicted bugs.
- How efficient do I feel?
- How productive do I feel?
This is surely not a comprehensive metric and I’m not recommending anyone use it to judge software engineers, but I’m interested in how these factors change. Ideally, I would have been tracking them prior to reading The Pragmatic Programmer to know my rate of natural improvement without the book’s tips, but alas.
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