A metric space for productivity measurement in software development

We define a metric space to measure the contributions of individual programmers to a software development project. It allows us to measure the distance between the contributions of two different programmers as well as the absolute contribution of each individual programmer. Our metric is based on an action function that provides a picture of how one programmer's approach differs from another at each instance of time during the project. We apply our metric to data we collected from students taking a course in parallel programming. We display the pictures for two students who showed approximately equal contributions but who followed very different paths through the course.