Organizational Ohm's Law in Practice: Measuring Engineering Productivity
Fei Liu, Todd McKinnon · IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management · 2024
Engineering productivity measures how effectively engineering teams produce valuable outcomes during a specific time frame. In this article, we aim to quantitatively explore the use of organizational Ohm's law to measure productivity in software engineering. According to this law, organizational productivity is directly proportional to outcome–output efficiency and organizational potential, while inversely proportional to organizational resistance. We derive measurable metrics from this law, which include engineer time allocation, engineer motivation, engineer skills, outcome–output alignment, lines of code, and usage-based business impact. We propose various practical methods to obtain these metrics and explain the considerations to determine the appropriate methods. Using these metrics, we comprehensively study and document four software product development projects. We apply the law to measure the engineering productivity of the projects. Our research supports the validity of organizational Ohm's law using lines of code output and usage-based business impact outcome. Our work demonstrates that organizational Ohm's law could provide an effective and intuitive model for understanding engineering productivity challenges.