Oscar Merida has shares some of his thoughts about measuring developer productivity inspired by a recent article covering the same topic.

My friend Sandy shared a link to a fascinating natural experiment comparing the productivity of two similarly tasked developer teams. If you haven’t read it already, take a minute to check it out. I’ve seen this need for visibility throughout my career. [...] if you want to measure actual productivity, in terms of what tasks your development team what can you do? This is where I think a good habit of issue+SCM tracking, rigorous testing , and continuous integration can really shine.

He also talks about a few of the bad practices some companies get in the habit of using to represent this same metric including "butts in seats" time and the totals of billable hours. He suggests a better alternative is measuring things like issues addressed in your bug tracker and ongoing performance metrics from a continuous integration system.

The PHP.net site has a new announcement about the latest version of the language in the PHP 5.4.x series - beta 2 has been released for testing.

The PHP development team is proud to announce the second beta release of PHP 5.4. PHP 5.4 includes new language features and removes several legacy (deprecated) behaviours. Windows binaries can be downloaded from the Windows QA site. [...] Please help us to identify bugs by testing new features and looking for unintended backward compatibility breaks, so we can fix the problems and fully document intended changes before PHP 5.4.0 is released. Report findings to the QA mailing list and/or the PHP bug tracker.

Remember - this is not a production release, so do not use it in your live applications (unless you really like to live dangerously, of course). You can look at the NEWS file for a complete list of changes.

Chris Jones has pointed out that the Google Summer of Code Projects for 2009 has been finalized and several PHP projects are on the list.

There's seven projects with a wide range of topics - here's the list:

• run-tests.php improvements
• Add decision and path coverage to Xdebug's code coverage instrumentation
• Bug Tracker Improvements
• PhD Improvements (Plugin System)
• Abstract Extension API and Dependency Interface
• Benchmark creation
• PhD O.E. - Online editor for the PHP Manual

You can find out more about the Google Summer of Code here.

Greg Beaver, frustrated with the bug tracker offerings out there, has taken the pearweb bug tracking system and modified it for use on his main project - the Chiara_PEAR_Server - as a bugtracker/timeline system.

You can grab a download of this project directly from the PEAR website and follow Greg's six simple steps to get it up and running.

Greg Beaver, frustrated with the bug tracker offerings out there, has taken the pearweb bug tracking system and modified it for use on his main project - the Chiara_PEAR_Server - as a bugtracker/timeline system.

You can grab a download of this project directly from the PEAR website and follow Greg's six simple steps to get it up and running.