begin quoting Christopher Smith as of Fri, Mar 28, 2008 at 02:30:23PM -0700:
> Lan Barnes wrote:
> >Managers are (usually) not stupid and many were once coders.
> >Unfortunately, they need metrics to drive decision making.
> >
> >LOC is perhaps the least useful metric possible and can actually be
> >destructive. It's alos toe metric with the largest body of accumulated
> >data.
> >
> >This tells me that most accumulated data on code productivity is BS.
> >
> >How do you compare 20 lines of assembler with 20 lines of Python?
> >
> The closest to an effective metric for managers came up when I was doing
> SCRUM. Part of the process with SCRUM is you do estimates in "units".
> Units have no root valuation, but over time, as the team gets better at
> estimating, you arrive at a decent sense of what a "unit" means in terms
> of the particular team in question. You can then use "units/week" to
> measure the relative productivity of folks on said team.
This doesn't let a generic manager* ("I know management, I don't have to
know anything about technology, the problem, or the people!") walk in
to a new team and immediately become productive.
> Of course, it
> is tricky to come up with a way to use this to compare programmers
> between teams, and even trickier to avoid people gaming the system if
> they know you are measuring their performance this way. :-(
Given a system, people will game it.
That's a fact of life. You'd think we'd've learned such things by now.
*Or management consultants.
--
Where there's a fixed-in-stone metric, there will be ways to game it.
Stewart Stremler
--
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