[philipmjohnson]

My research group investigated this approach to software metrics collection and analysis for about 10 years with an open source project called "Hackystat". We wrote around 50 papers and there was a startup based on our approach (that was later aquihired.) You can find a list of papers we wrote here:

http://www.citeulike.org/group/3370/tag/hackystat

The first one, "Searching under the streetlight for useful software metrics" is our attempt to summarize the strengths and weaknesses of this approach.

There are significant challenges associated with making this kind of data actionable, and significant political/social issues associated with collecting this data at all.