[gruseom]

You pointed out that productivity can't be measured (though that hasn't stopped you from invoking the concept). Something else that can't be measured? "Business value".

Let alone the "business value" of an individual programmer's commits.

[jdlshore]

Yes, I completely agree. Why do you mention it?

[gruseom]

Well, statements like "skill in coding isn't important unless it leads to tangible business results" seem to suggest that there is a way of linking the two. But there isn't. So it's misleading to talk this way. In practice, people just use it to confirm their prejudices (specifically about who is and isn't productive), which they've arrived at for other reasons.

I think "business value" is a particularly bad phrase because it sounds like something that can be quantified and has a clear implication about which class of people will do the quantifying (namely, business people as opposed to technical people). In reality, it can't, and the term is really about power dynamics within companies.

[jdlshore]

Hmm... I can't agree. "Business value" is a useful term for describing sources of value beyond revenue. It's extremely fluffy and usually unmeasurable, sure, but it's still a useful way of talking about things that are worth doing that don't produce revenue, such as competitive differentiation, market research, brand promotion, philanthropic efforts, and relationship building. For software that doesn't produce direct revenue (the majority, in my experience), what better term is there?

I don't know why you say business value is actually about power dynamics, unless you mean that people use the term to promote their pet projects. If so, I think that has more to do with human nature than the term "business value."

[gruseom]

I don't think we understand the term "business value" the same way. It seems to me a better term for what you're talking about would just be "value".

The power dynamic aspect is this: who gets to decide what has "business value"? I would like the answer to be: anyone who has good insight and can convince their team. But when the answer instead is "a class of people called 'managers' or 'businessperson'", that is what I object to. Membership in that class is a matter of organizational status, not insight or merit.

But in a message board discussion it's hard to tell where we're talking about the same things and where we're not. Wish there were an easy way to get semantic diffs.

[batista]

>Something else that can't be measured? "Business value".

If it makes money, it has business value, in my book. If it makes MORE money, it has more business value.

Actually it might be the ONLY measurable thing in the whole discussion.

[gruseom]

Well of course, but that's just a trivial restatement of the problem. Anyone can measure dollar amounts once they have them; money is a measure. The question is how to assign such amounts.

For business value to be measurable means you have a function M(x) that maps x to money. The trouble isn't with the range of that function, it's establishing what the domain is and how to compute M.

People often talk about business value on software projects as if they have such an M when they don't. What they have is an imaginary M whose domain is "what I care about" and whose output is "what I want to believe". Such discourse is dysfunctional.

The truth is that you have M for the business as a whole and maybe for specific products (though I can cite cases where even that was dubious) and it typically breaks as you try to get finer-grained.