Features per Developer

WHY IT MATTERS

Features per developer measures the rate at which developers deliver new functionality with a quality balance. More productive teams ship more features.

HOW IT'S MEASURED

Features are pull requests multiplied by percentage of new code. They also exclude certain pull requests – such as those authored by bots – that are not representative of development productivity. The number of developers is a 90-day rolling average of the number of contributors who created at least one pull request.

Features per developer = pull requests × % new code ÷ developers

Development features are not the same as customer or product features. For instance, a customer feature to measure the impact of AI coding tools on productivity might encompass several smaller development features, like tracking coding activity, sending events through a data pipeline, and then building several data visualizations.

While development features do not encompass the value of what you’re producing or whether or not you're picking the right things to work on from a product management perspective, they are a better measure of the productivity of your development team than customer features. A key lesson from Agile and CI/CD is that smaller batches are faster, more reliable, and more predictable. More productive teams have higher development feature velocity. Additionally, whereas customer features can vary widely in size and scope, development features are a standard, universal metric that you can use to benchmark groups.