[hello_moto]

That's because half-decent dev shop thought that they're full of good developers and their best developers managed to convince the management that measurement and metrics suck, just because software development is different!

Really, we need some kind of measurements or metrics. Otherwise, how else do we know we're progressing or improving or at least not sucking more.

I agree that metrics is hard to do and easy to game. That's why don't put a specific number or targets. And also don't tight metrics with employee performance. Put it on team's performance (still not perfect, but I'm sure it's better).

One example of metric that probably might have made sense is that if your shop is doing Agile (code review, code coverage, unit-test, # of bugs etc.) is to make sure that these numbers don't go down in every iteration. Make sure these numbers either stay the same or go up (in the case of improvements or new development). If the numbers go down for 2 consecutive iteration, someone or some team doesn't care about quality. Track improvements, not specific number.

Side note: I would suggest people to read Standish Group Chaos Report to understand how bad our industry was and how far have we improved over the years.

[slantyyz]

"metrics are are hard to do and easy to game"

That is the painful truth with employee measurement in general (hm, perhaps another knock against software dev being different). I would still say that the junk "objective" metrics provided in the original article aren't generally used in any competent dev shop.