How Meta is Using a New Metric for Developers: Diff Authoring Time
Briefly

The article emphasizes the importance of tracking developer productivity metrics to improve efficiency in software development workflows. A new metric, Diff Authoring Time (DAT), developed by Meta, measures the duration for developers to submit changes to the codebase. By integrating a privacy-aware telemetry system, organizations can gain insights into the development process and identify areas for improvement. Meta's use of DAT has shown significant improvements in authoring time, enhancing overall engineering efficiency and supporting data-driven decision-making.
Tracking developer productivity metrics is essential for understanding and improving the efficiency of software development workflows. In fast-paced engineering environments, small inefficiencies can accumulate, impacting overall delivery timelines and code quality.
Implementing DAT involves integrating a privacy-aware telemetry system with version control systems, integrated development environments (IDEs), and operating systems. This setup allows for the precise measurement of the time developers spend authoring code changes without compromising privacy.
DAT has been instrumental in evaluating the impact of introducing a type-safe mocking framework in Hack, leading to a 14% improvement in authoring time. Additionally, the development of automatic memoization in the React compiler resulted in a 33% improvement.
The significance of DAT lies in its ability to provide a precise yet comprehensive measure of development productivity, facilitating data-driven decisions to enhance engineering efficiency.
Read at InfoQ
[
|
]