Unintended Consequences of Metrics (and Measuring)

Ed Yourdon has an interesting list of 13 common political problems associated with metrics initiatives.

He includes the old cliche about "you get what you measure", which is the one I thought of first.

My snap reaction was that SW development of any complexity has traditionally involved a roadmap in the form of a process and associated artifacts. The artifacts model the target "chunk of knowledge" being created (at increasingly lower levels of abstraction), and the process models the governance of the creation activity.

Monitoring those models inevitably involves metrics, but since these metrics are one or more steps away from the actual target "chunk of knowledge", they are always proxies and are subject to various interpretations by those who interact with them.

I suspect at least a part of the problem springs from a basic human desire for a "magic incantation" that can be mindlessly recited....we all know such a desire is foolish, but like many foolish desires, we're apt to occasionally give in....just look at the management best sellers of the past few decades.