Features per Developer

DEFINITION

Features per developer is our primary measure of productivity. It measures how many new changes your development team is producing over time.

HOW IT'S MEASURED

Features represent new work delivered, excluding recent bug fixes and legacy refactoring. They also exclude pull requests authored by bots.

The number of developers is a 30-day rolling average of the number of contributors who created at least one pull request.

DEVELOPMENT FEATURES VS. CUSTOMER FEATURES

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.

Whereas customer features can vary widely in size and scope, development features are a standard, universal metric that you can use to benchmark groups.

While development features do not encompass the value of what you’re producing or whether or not you're picking the right customer features to work on from a product management perspective, they are a better measure of the productivity of your development team.