[recursivecaveat]

I think a bad metric is very much worse than nothing. It sucks away time to record, debate, report, and discuss. It encourages bad decision making. If you throw up a number people will give it weight, even if it's stupid. Multiplying 6 gut checks and trying to make a decision about engineering direction is like tracking someone's mood by the metric of whether they ate an odd or even number of calories yesterday. There's theoretically a signal under all that noise, but the direct gut-check or any number of qualitative clues are so much better than the distracting number.

[kayo_20211030]

I agree whole-heartedly. A bad metric is a curse. It's misleading, resulting in waste, and falsely reassuring simply because it exists as a number. +100 on the gut-check qualitative approach

[haskellandchill]

You can say whatever you want, there are studies backing up the beneficial impact of quantitative over qualitative.

[kayo_20211030]

They'd be quantitive studies of quality, I hope.