alt Hacker NewsCan you define what “all else” means here?
PRs or closed jira tickets can be a metric of productivity only if they add or improve the existing feature set of the product.
If a PR introduces a feature with 10 bugs in other features and I have my agent swarm fix those in 10-20 PRs in a week, my productivity and delivery have both taken a hit. If any of these features went to prod, I have lost revenue as well.
Shipping is not same as shipping correctly with minimal introduction of bugs.
"All else equal" means that PR volume is a signal that needs to be read in context a number of other metrics, as well as qualitative feedback.
You're absolutely right that PRs fixing things that a previous PR broke is a negative. Same for PRs implementing work not needed, or driving up tech debt.
"You're productive because you have lots of PRs" is a mistake without that context. But so is "You produce very little PRs, but that's fine, we shouldn't look at volume".
It's not a performance metric. It is an indicator worth following up. And there's a lot of reflexive "bad metric" arguments blanket dismissing that indicator.
Does that help explain?