My Response To The Nonsense McKinsey Article On Developer Productivity • Dave Farley • GOTO 2025

We’re so pleased to having teamed up with Dave Farley, author of “Continuous Delivery” and frequent GOTO Conferences speaker, for a monthly video series featuring ideas about continuous delivery, DevOps, test-driven development, BDD, software engineering and software development in general. Find plenty more from Dave on his @ModernSoftwareEngineeringYT channel. Dave Farley - Continuous Delivery & DevOps Pioneer, Award-winning Author, Founder & Director of Continuous Delivery Ltd. RESOURCES Dave https://bsky.app/profile/davefarley77.bsky.social https://www.continuous-delivery.co.uk https://linkedin.com/in/dave-farley-a67927 https://twitter.com/davefarley77 http://www.davefarley.net ABSTRACT Consulting group McKinsey & Company have recently published an article called “Yes you can measure software developer productivity” which has been widely criticised. Grady Booth said “It’s rubbish”, Kent Back said “The report is so absurd and naive that it makes no sense to critique it in detail” and Daniel Terhorst-North said, “Don’t try to measure the individual contribution of a unit in a complex adaptive system, because the premise of the question is flawed”. In this episode software engineer and author, Dave Farley joins in with the critique, and while agreeing with Kent Beck on most things, does look at the report in some detail to critique it. He finds that the McKinsey developer productivity article is as useless and ill-informed as the reactions of many other industry experts would suggest. McKinsey Article: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/technology-media-and-telecommunications/our-insights/yes-you-can-measure-software-developer-productivity#/ CD TRAINING COURSES If you want to learn Continuous Delivery and DevOps skills, check out Dave Farley's courses https://bit.ly/DFTraining RECOMMENDED BOOKS & LINKS You can grab Dave Farley's new book 'Continuous Delivery Pipelines' here: https://leanpub.com/cd-pipelines David Farley • Modern Software Engineering • https://amzn.to/3GI468M Dave Farley & Jez Humble • Continuous Delivery • https://amzn.to/3ocIHwd Forsgren, Humble & Kim • Accelerate • https://amzn.to/367RI5o Gojko Adzic & David Evans • 50 Quick Ideas to Improve your User Stories • https://leanpub.com/50quickideas https://bsky.app/profile/gotocon.com https://twitter.com/GOTOcon https://www.linkedin.com/company/goto- https://www.instagram.com/goto_con https://www.facebook.com/GOTOConferences #GOTOxDaveFarley #DeveloperProductivity #McKinsey #Requirements #Programming #DaveFarley #GOTO #GOTOcon #Complexity #ProgrammingTutorial #SoftwareEngineering CHANNEL MEMBERSHIP BONUS Join this channel to get early access to videos & other perks: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs_tLP3AiwYKwdUHpltJPuA/join Looking for a unique learning experience? Attend the next GOTO conference near you! Get your ticket at https://gotopia.tech SUBSCRIBE TO OUR CHANNEL - new videos posted almost daily. https://www.youtube.com/user/GotoConferences/?sub_confirmation=1