How can you tell how efficient your software development/migration process is?
It might be interesting to develop a set of metrics that capture the amount of time and steps involved with doing certain common activitives on a development effort. A simple but I think effective measurement might be what is involved with adding a data-driven, context sensitive drop down list to a WinForm or WebForm. This would involve steps similar to the following:
- Adding the data source to populate the drop down
- Adding the field to be controlled to the data base
- Getting the source from your source control repository
- Modifying the data transfer objects to get the selected value between the database and the control
- Modify the user interface to add the control
- Checking in the changes
- Add some sort of help documentation
- Develop any required tests
- Migration to the three typical environments (Dev, Stage, Prod) for both the application code and database objects.
Come to think of it if this process was captured (even without any metrics) it would go a long ways for developer documentation.